Unobtrusive Recognition of Personality Traits with Health Impact: A Literature Review with a Focus on Conscientiousness and Neuroticism

Non communicable diseases (NCDs) impose the greatest burden on global health. Any technology that helps making treatment more effective or efficient can potentially benefit humanity at a grand scale. Health information technology (HIT) has been identified as offering such potential, and indeed, existing HIT-based interventions are targeting NCD-related specific diseases such as diabetes, asthma, or mental illness. Rather generic determinants impacting health outcomes are the personality traits conscientiousness and neuroticism. We argue in this article that HIT-based interventions can benefit from an unobtrusive recognition of conscientiousness and neuroticism, both for tailoring interventions and for the adaptation of these traits. We conducted a systematic literature review to identify relevant behavioral features representing conscientiousness and neuroticism. Overall, 17 out of 262 articles have been found to be relevant for this purpose. We found that for conscientiousness, features relating to media consumption (video) and creation (photo) were highly relevant, as well as features related to communication style (use of negations), and features relating to the behavior of social contacts and variety of balancedness of relationships. For neuroticism, we found that features relating to the use of words of certain classes (religion, hearing) were particularly relevant, as well as variation in message length across contacts, and communication style (use of exclamation marks). This work concludes with an outlook on future research.