Leveraging the Potential of Personality Traits for Digital Health Interventions: a Literature Review on Digital Markers for Conscientiousness and Neuroticism

Digital health interventions (DHIs) are designed to help individuals manage their disease, such as asthma, diabetes, or major depression. While there is a broad body of literature on how to design evidence-based DHIs with respect to behavioral theories, behavior change techniques or various design features, targeting personality traits has been neglected so far in DHI designs, although there is evidence of their impact on health. In particular, conscientiousness, which is related to therapy adherence, and neuroticism, which impacts long-term health of chronic patients, are two personality traits with an impact on health. Sensing these traits via digital markers from online and smartphone data sources and providing corresponding personality change interventions, i.e. to increase conscientiousness and to reduce neuroticism, may be an important active and generic ingredient for various DHIs. As a first step towards this novel class of personality change DHIs, we conducted a systematic literature review on relevant digital markers related to conscientiousness and neuroticism. Overall, 344 articles were reviewed and 21 were selected for further analysis. We found various digital markers for conscientiousness and neuroticism and discuss them with respect to future work, i.e. the design and evaluation of personality change DHIs.