Understanding Personalization for Health Behavior Change Applications: A Review and Future Directions

Health behavior change (HBC) applications hold much promise for promoting healthy lifestyles, such as enhancing physical activity (PA), diet, and sleep. Incorporating personalization strategies is seen as key to designing effective HBC applications. However, researchers and application designers lack knowledge about the different kinds of personalization strategies, how to implement them, and what strategies work. Thus, we reviewed prior empirical studies on personalization for HBC applications and developed a framework to synthesize the prior studies we identified and to provide an integrative view of the personalization strategies, their inputs, and outcomes. Our findings suggest that researchers have much potential to conduct design research that employs demographic and contextual characteristics for personalization and that examines personalization strategies that target HBC applications’ interface and channels. In terms of implementation and adoption, we call for researchers to examine unaddressed issues such as low adherence and contextual barriers for these applications. We also suggest that researchers need to systematically examine the effects of specific personalization strategies on their efficacy. Other than providing an integrative view of extant studies, our study contributes by outlining key directions for future research in this area.