Persuasive Design for Healthy Eating: A Scoping Review

In this scoping review, we aimed to summarize and analyze the latest research developments of persuasive design for healthy eating behavior and explore future design opportunities. This paper initially collected 1231 papers from 2011 to 2021 in three different databases: the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) digital library, IEEE Xplore and SpringerLink databases. Based on a selection process, 28 papers that mainly focused on addressing dietary health by persuasive designs were eventually included in final analysis. These 28 papers were sorted by three characteristics: research specifications, methodologies, and design rationales. Our data analyses revealed that the reviewed papers primarily utilized persuasive technologies for eating behaviors monitoring, recording, and healthy eating suggestion. Moreover, six types of design applications were commonly implemented, including mobile applications, persuasive messages, digital products and service systems, wearable devices, chatbots/assistants, and public devices. Our review showed that persuasive design, as a generic approach for promoting healthy eating, lacked research investigations on personalized solutions for particular user groups such as office workers and teenagers. Future works could explore persuasive design strategies by applying the research factors of user experience and examining the efficacy of persuasive technology tools to effectively promote healthy eating behaviors for various user groups in different contexts.