Digital therapy: Addressing willpower as part of the cognitive-affective processing system in the service of habit change

Abstract

We know much too little about how to design effective digital interventions to support sustained behavior change and improved well-being. The purpose of the present paper was to contribute in two ways. First, we want to contribute to current practice in designing such interventions. Second, we try to identify key research questions that could be a point of departure for a more detailed and comprehensive future research program. The propositions we suggest reflect that the construction of digital interventions should be seen as an iterative process which should take into account both "content" and "design" factors. However, we argue that intervention research and practical design experience is not just something that follows basic research at a polite distance, but rather is its inherent complement. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.