Exploring the Persuasiveness of "Just-in-time" Motivational Messages for Obesity Management

The healthcare industry in the United States is going through major challenges in terms of financial and human resources. One of the preferred ways to address this issue is to develop effective prevention systems so that the people can live healthy lives and in turn minimize the use of the medical system. Preventing diseases requires people to adopt healthy lifestyles. Advances in pervasive technology provide promising opportunity in developing such systems. Specifically, sending “just-in-time” motivational messages to help people make right health related decision has been pointed out as an emerging field of research. However, in order to persuade the users to take a healthy action, it is essential that the “just-in-time” messages are persuasive to the recipients. In this study, we explored persuasiveness of such messages by considering two of the five elements (source, channel, message, receiver and destination) of a communication process with a focus on obesity management.