Exploring Persuasive Techniques for Medication Compliance

Mobile applications that incorporate persuasive techniques have recently been shown to have a positive impact in helping their users achieve pre-defined wellness goals (e.g., keeping active, eating healthier, etc.). In this paper, we present MoviPill, a mobile phone based application that combines a set of persuasive techniques (i.e., social competition through a game, social support, virtual rewards and entertaining selfmonitoring) to help patients improve their levels of medication compliance. In a 6-week field study, 18 elders used a simplified version of MoviPill that included only the game component. Still, both their compliance levels and the precision of the drug intake time improved by 60% and 43% respectively, when compared to the baseline (i.e. their usual medication reminding tools). We plan on evaluating the additional persuasive techniques with further studies.