skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


  • NSF Public Access
  • Search Results
  • Motivational Interviewing Conversational Agent for Parents as Proxies for Their Children in Healthy Eating: Development and User Testing
Title: Motivational Interviewing Conversational Agent for Parents as Proxies for Their Children in Healthy Eating: Development and User Testing
Background Increased adoption of off-the-shelf conversational agents (CAs) brings opportunities to integrate therapeutic interventions. Motivational Interviewing (MI) can then be integrated with CAs for cost-effective access to it. MI can be especially beneficial for parents who often have low motivation because of limited time and resources to eat healthy together with their children. Objective We developed a Motivational Interviewing Conversational Agent (MICA) to improve healthy eating in parents who serve as a proxy for health behavior change in their children. Proxy relationships involve a person serving as a catalyst for behavior change in another person. Parents, serving as proxies, can bring about behavior change in their children. Methods We conducted user test sessions of the MICA prototype to understand the perceived acceptability and usefulness of the MICA prototype by parents. A total of 24 parents of young children participated in 2 user test sessions with MICA, approximately 2 weeks apart. After parents’ interaction with the MICA prototype in each user test session, we used qualitative interviews to understand parents’ perceptions and suggestions for improvements in MICA. Results Findings showed participants’ perceived usefulness of MICAs for helping them self-reflect and motivating them to adopt healthier eating habits together with their children. Participants further suggested various ways in which MICA can help them safely manage their children’s eating behaviors and provide customized support for their proxy needs and goals. Conclusions We have discussed how the user experience of CAs can be improved to uniquely offer support to parents who serve as proxies in changing the behavior of their children. We have concluded with implications for a larger context of designing MI-based CAs for supporting proxy relationships for health behavior change.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2144880
PAR ID:
10404513
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
JMIR Human Factors
Volume:
9
Issue:
4
ISSN:
2292-9495
Page Range / eLocation ID:
e38908
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)
    Millions of people participate in online peer-to-peer support sessions, yet there has been little prior research on systematic psychology-based evaluations of fine-grained peer-counselor behavior in relation to client satisfaction. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by mapping peer-counselor chat-messages to motivational interviewing (MI) techniques. We annotate 14,797 utterances from 734 chat conversations using 17 MI techniques and introduce four new interviewing codes such as ''chit-chat'' and ''inappropriate'' to account for the unique conversational patterns observed on online platforms. We automate the process of labeling peer-counselor responses to MI techniques by fine-tuning large domain-specific language models and then use these automated measures to investigate the behavior of the peer counselors via correlational studies. Specifically, we study the impact of MI techniques on the conversation ratings to investigate the techniques that predict clients' satisfaction with their counseling sessions. When counselors use techniques such as reflection and affirmation, clients are more satisfied. Examining volunteer counselors' change in usage of techniques suggest that counselors learn to use more introduction and open questions as they gain experience. This work provides a deeper understanding of the use of motivational interviewing techniques on peer-to-peer counselor platforms and sheds light on how to build better training programs for volunteer counselors on online platforms. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; (, ACM)
    Conversational agents (CAs) are increasingly prevalent in children’s lives, serving as educational companions, particularly in shared reading activities. While effective for monolingual children’s learning, there exists a gap in meeting the unique needs of the rapidly expanding bilingual child population, who face dual challenges of school readiness and heritage language maintenance. Moreover, most current CAs, designed for one-to-one interactions with children, neglect the importance of parents’ active participation in shared reading. Our study introduces the development and home deployment of a bilingual CA, integrated within e-books, designed to foster parent-child joint engagement in shared reading, thereby promoting children’s bilingual language development. Results of the study indicated high levels of family engagement in co-reading activities over an extended period, with observable language learning gains in children. This study provides valuable design implications for designing effective and engaging CAs for bilingual families. 
    more » « less
  3. ; (, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)
    Since online discussion platforms can limit the perception of social cues, effective collaboration over videochat requires additional attention to conversational skills. However, self-affirmation and defensive bias theories indicate that feedback may appear confrontational, especially when users are not motivated to incorporate them. We develop a feedback chatbot that employs Motivational Interviewing (MI), a directive counseling method that encourages commitment to behavior change, with the end goal of improving the user's conversational skills. We conduct a within-subject study with 21 participants in 8 teams to evaluate our MI-agent 'MIA' and a non-MI-agent 'Roboto'. After interacting with an agent, participants are tasked with conversing over videochat to evaluate candidate résumés for a job circular. Our quantitative evaluation shows that the MI-agent effectively motivates users, improves their conversational skills, and is likable. Through a qualitative lens, we present the strategies and the cautions needed to fulfill individual and team goals during group discussions. Our findings reveal the potential of the MI technique to improve collaboration and provide examples of conversational tactics important for optimal discussion outcomes. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; (, Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020))
    null (Ed.)
    Traditional parental control applications designed to protect children and teens from online risks do so through parental restrictions and privacy-invasive monitoring. We propose a new approach to adolescent online safety that aims to strike a balance between a teen’s privacy and their online safety through active communication and fostering trust between parents and children. We designed and developed an Android “app” called Circle of Trust and conducted a mixed methods user study of 17 parent-child pairs to understand their perceptions about the app. Using a within-subjects experimental design, we found that parents and children significantly preferred our new app design over existing parental control apps in terms of perceived usefulness, ease of use, and behavioral intent to use. By applying a lens of Value Sensitive Design to our interview data, we uncovered that parents and children who valued privacy, trust, freedom, and balance of power preferred our app over traditional apps. However, those who valued transparency and control preferred the status quo. Overall, we found that our app was better suited for teens than for younger children. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; (, 2022 IEEE/ACM Conference on Connected Health: Applications, Systems and Engineering Technologies (CHASE))
    With rapid growth in unhealthy diet behaviors, implementing strategies that improve healthy eating is becoming increasingly important. One approach to improving diet behavior is to continuously monitor dietary intake (e.g., calorie intake) and provide educational, motivational, and dietary recommendation feedback. Although technologies based on wearable sensors, mobile applications, and light-weight cameras exist to gather diet-related information such as food type and eating time, there remains a gap in research on how to use such information to close the loop and provide feedback to the user to improve healthy diet. We address this knowledge gap by introducing a diet behavior change framework that generates real-time diet recommendations based on a user’s food intake and considering user’s deviation from the suggested diet routine. We formulate the problem of optimal diet recommendation as a sequential decision making problem and design a greedy algorithm that provides diet recommendations such that the amount of change in user’s dietary habits is minimized while ensuring that the user’s diet goal is achieved within a given time-frame. This novel approach is inspired by the Social Cognitive Theory, which emphasizes behavioral monitoring and small incremental goals as being important to behavior change. Our optimization algorithm integrates data from a user’s past dietary intake as well as the USDA nutrition dataset to identify optimal diet changes. We demonstrate the feasibility of our optimization algorithms for diet behavior change using real-data collected in two study cohorts with a combined N=10 healthy participants who recorded their diet for up to 21 days. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email