Investigating effects of interactive signage–based stimulation for promoting behavior change

In recent years, many types of research and developments on behavior change have been conducted. The purpose of behavior change is to improve people's lifestyle pattern or to maintain the improvement for a long time with the aim to achieve a goal such as promoting health condition improvement. To achieve the foundation of a new lifestyle, it is necessary to recognize the daily life patterns of users and give triggers for behavior change to users in their daily life. To realize this, in our research, we develop an interactive signage which is able to identify and actively talk to the passing user and try to induce behavior change by sending visual and auditory stimulation. Then, we record users' reactions and upload them to the server. In this paper, we report the investigation result on users' reactions and feelings to the developed interactive signage. As a survey experiment, we set up four interactive signs on a floor of our university and asked 15 participants to carry a name tag with a Bluetooth Low Energy beacon during their daily life. Five kinds of tasks based on dialogue scenarios are posted to the approaching participants. Participants can respond to these tasks through a touchscreen. The period of the experiment was three weeks. To get the data in an ideal environment, during the first week, we asked all the participants to respond to the utterance from the interactive signage whenever they hear the voice message. During the next two weeks, participants were not asked to respond to the task definitely to get the data in the real environment. The result of the experiment showed that our proposed interactive signage could induce behavior change effectively. Based on the result of experiment, we updated our interactive signage system by adding response time (the time passed from showing contents until user respond), record function, and voice feedback function. Furthermore, to collect the data of response time that is considered as a part of users' reactions, we conducted an additional experiment with the same participants in previous experiment (except for one missing participant) for one week after updating the system. In the additional experiment, the participants were not asked to respond to the utterance definitely. As a result, it is shown that the behavior change by the proposed signage is still effectively induced. We also analyzed the relationship between the day passed and the response rate of each task type. The result shows that the number of ignorance of personal task and check task does not rise even as the time passes.