JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Well-being is a cornerstone of public health and social progress, yet its determinants are multifaceted and dynamic. As behavioral data become increasingly available and artificial intelligence (AI) systems gain prominence, scalable assessments of well-being are becoming more feasible. However, to be useful in practice, such systems must remain understandable to the people they aim to support. Explainable AI (XAI) is therefore essential to foster trust, enable reflection, and inform action.

Objective:

This research aimed to investigate (1) the extent to which modifiable lifestyle and contextual factors can predict subjective well-being, and (2) how different explanation modalities influence users’ satisfaction when interpreting AI-generated well-being feedback.

Methods:

We conducted a two-stage, application-grounded investigation. First, we developed a parsimonious regularized linear model using a small set of lifestyle-related predictors to estimate individual well-being. Second, we experimentally compared multiple explanation modalities (visual, interactive, textual, quantitative, and population-comparison) against a no-explanation control to evaluate how each format shapes end-users’ satisfaction with the AI-generated assessment.

Results:

Across conditions, providing any explanation increased users’ satisfaction relative to the no-explanation control in the final sample (1252 participants). Visual (B=0.915, SE 0.077; P<.001) and interactive (B=0.914, SE 0.076; P<.001) explanations produced the highest satisfaction scores, while textual (B=0.850, SE 0.076; P<.001) and quantitative (B=0.782, SE 0.077; P<.001) formats also showed strong positive effects. Population-comparison (contextual) explanations yielded a smaller effect (B=0.218, SE 0.077; P=.005) and were consistently the least preferred and least effective at conveying why the model produced a given assessment.

Conclusions:

The findings suggest that well-being applications should combine simple, interpretable models with visual or interactive explanations that foreground actionable behavioral levers rather than emphasizing population norms. These insights offer design guidance for deploying XAI in well-being tools to support user understanding and potential behavior change.