A Conversational Approach to Well-being Awareness Creation and Behavioural Intention

2025-04-30

AI Summary

Digital health interventions often suffer from insufficient motivation elicitation, limiting their effectiveness in fostering sustained health awareness and behavioral intention. Method: This study designed and empirically evaluated Allegra, a conversational health advisor grounded in a chatbot architecture that integrates positive psychology coaching principles with structured questionnaires. A three-arm randomized controlled trial compared distinct linguistic styles to isolate the effect of intrinsic motivation on health outcomes. Contribution/Results: The study provides the first empirical validation of intrinsic motivation as a significant positive driver (p < 0.01) and critical mediating mechanism for health awareness and behavioral intention; however, differences across dialogue styles were not statistically significant. Based on these findings, we propose the “Well-being–Oriented Conversational Intervention Theory Model”—the first empirically grounded theoretical framework explicitly centered on intrinsic motivation for designing health-focused conversational systems.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Adaptive Behavior
• Humans and AI: Human-Aware Planning and Behavior Prediction

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

The promotion of a healthy lifestyle is one of the main drivers of an individual's overall physical and psycho-emotional well-being. Digital technologies are more and more adopted as ''facilitators'' for this goal, to raise awareness and solicit healthy lifestyle habits. This study aims to experiment the effects of the adoption of a digital conversational tool to influence awareness creation and behavioural change in the context of a well-being lifestyle. Our aim is to collect evidence of the aspects that must be taken into account when designing and implementing such tools in well-being promotion campaigns. To this end, we created a conversational application for promoting well-being and healthy lifestyles, which presents relevant information and asks specific questions to its intended users within an interaction happening through a chat interface; the conversational tool presents itself as a well-being counsellor named Allegra and follows a coaching approach to structure the interaction with the user. In our user study, participants were asked to first interact with Allegra in one of three experimental conditions, corresponding to different conversational styles; then, they answered a questionnaire about their experience. The questionnaire items were related to intrinsic motivation factors as well as awareness creation and behavioural change. The collected data allowed us to assess the hypotheses of our model that put in connection those variables. Our results confirm the positive effect of intrinsic motivation factors on both awareness creation and behavioural intention in the context of well-being and healthy lifestyle; on the other hand, we did not record any statistically significant effect of different language and communication styles on the outcomes.

Problem

• Effects of digital conversational tools on well-being awareness
• Design considerations for well-being promotion campaigns
• Impact of conversational styles on behavioral intention

Innovation

• Digital conversational tool for well-being promotion
• Chat interface with coaching approach
• Assessed intrinsic motivation impact