Recommendations as Challenges: Estimating Required Effort and User Ability for Health Behavior Change Recommendations

Helma Torkamaan, Jürgen Ziegler

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Recommender Systems use implicit and explicit user feedback to recommend desired products or items online. When the recommendation item is a task or behavior change activity, several variables, such as the difficulty of the task and users' ability to achieve it, in addition to user preferences and needs, determine the suitability of the recommendations. This paper focuses on how user ability and task difficulty concepts can be integrated into the recommendation process to personalize health activity recommendations. To this end, we compare five approaches, some borrowed from the sports and gaming world, and explore their application, advantages, and drawbacks. Through a study of two weeks, we obtained a suitable dataset to investigate how these algorithms can be used for a health recommender system (HRS) and which one is the most appropriate choice for an online HRS in terms of characteristics and flexibility required for behavior change related tailoring. We compared this choice with a baseline algorithm as part of a fully functional HRS to assess the feasibility and impact of integrating the user ability and required effort concepts on the user engagement with the recommendations in an online longitudinal study of two weeks. The results overall suggest that such integration is effective, and in addition to realizing health behavior change requirements, it improves user engagement with the recommendations.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication27th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 2022
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages106-119
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450391443
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Externally publishedYes
Event27th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 2022 - Virtual, Online, Finland
Duration: 22 Mar 202225 Mar 2022

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Proceedings IUI

Conference

Conference27th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 2022
Country/TerritoryFinland
CityVirtual, Online
Period22/03/2225/03/22

Keywords

  • Ability
  • Behavior change
  • Difficulty
  • Elo
  • Glicko-2
  • Health recommender systems
  • Personalization
  • Rasch
  • TrueSkill

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