Persuasive Interfaces for Medicine:
Enabling Patients to Change Health-related Behaviors

Persuasion, as opposed to coercion, is the act of convincing a person to adopt an idea or to take an action without constraining his or her freedom to choose between multiple alternatives.  Persuading patients to adopt healthy behaviors is an important part of the physician’s role, and this area needs to receive more attention in the future.

In the past, doctors and patients interacted directly.  Patients usually trusted their doctors, and they usually felt confident in the decisions made related to their medical care.  Today, patients have access to more sources of medical information than in the past, and the doctor-patient relationship is complicated by technology.  As in the past, patients often do not follow their doctors’ recommendations.  In the future, if compliance is to be improved, the trust between patients and doctors must be improved.  Patients must be persuaded to appreciate the importance of adhering to medical recommendations.  Technology has the potential to become an important persuasive tool.  With the right population data and simulations, doctors will hopefully be able to show patients why it is important to not smoke, to eat a healthy diet, to exercise, to take medications correctly, and to adopt other healthy behaviors.

Problems related to compliance can often be resolved if patients are persuaded to see the importance of what their doctors recommend.  Today, fifty percent of patients do not take their medications correctly, and this lack of adherence causes approximately 125,000 deaths each year.  One group at MIT has created a simulation that shows patients with HIV how their medications affect the number of viruses in the blood.  The simulation also shows what happens in the blood when medication is not taken as directed.  Simulations of this type will hopefully become a widely used persuasive tool in the future.

 

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