Recently, mobile interruptibility studies shifted the focus to the moment of interruption. Traditionally, task complexity, task duration, and the moment of interruption has been identified as determining factors for the appropriateness of an interruption. Especially if target behaviour has to be performed at a specific time, people could benefit from a reminder system.įurthermore, interruptibility has been studied extensively (e.g. Prospective memory also makes use of these type of triggers, and research has shown that people perform better at event-based intentions than at time-based intentions. An example of a time-based action is taking cookies out of the oven in 20 min, an example of an event-based action is bringing up an issue during the next meeting, and a location-based action is throwing a letter in a mailbox when passing by. Various trigger methods are time-based, event-based, and location-based. Another distinction in reminders can be made based on the trigger method utilized. A signal is a simple reminder used in cases where both motivation and ability are high. A facilitator is a cue that makes it easier to exhibit a certain type of behaviour (enhances ability). There are three core motivators that sparks can use: pleasure-pain, hope-fear, and social acceptance-rejection. A spark is a cue that enhances motivation. He distinguishes sparks, facilitators, and signals. Fogg describes three types of triggers in his behavioural model. Ranging from tying a string around your finger, self-written notes, to reminders set on PDAs, watches, and smartphones. Reminders have been used in various domains in different forms for a long time.
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Reminders provided for example by a smartphone can serve as these cues and might play an important role in performing targeted behaviour. When that cue occurs the intended action is remembered automatically. The idea is that an intended action is associated with a cue. Several models attempt to explain how prospective memory works e.g., the preparatory attentional and memory theory, the reflexive-associative theory, and the multi-process model. Forgetfulness, or prospective memory failure, is one of the main reasons. For example, people forget to take their pills. Not only medical professionals suffer from prospective memory failures, also patients suffer from it. Another study in the health domain found that most of the preventable mistakes were prospective memory failures. In fact, Kliegel and Martin state that 50–80% of everyday life forgetting is due to these prospective memory failures.
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Everyone suffers from prospective memory failures. The intention to do something in the future is formed in prospective memory. Fogetting to buy milk is less problematic than forgetting to take a sleeping baby out of a soon to be hot car, or medical errors during surgery. Some of these memory failures can be fatal. The consequences of forgetting to do something depend on what was forgotten.
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Although the study focussed on CBT-I, we expect that designers of other computerized health interventions benefit from the tested opportunity and self-empowerment principles for reminders to improve adherence, as well.Įveryone forgets to do something now and then. Opportunity and self-empowerment could partly mediate adherence to filling out the sleep diary, but not to the number of relaxation exercises conducted. No differences were found between the two types of reminders. Both types of reminders improved adherence compared to no reminders. A within subject design was used in which the effect of reminders and two underlying principles were tested by 45 participants that all received the following three different conditions (in random order): a) event-based reminders b) time-based reminders c) no reminders. The prototype consisted of a sleep diary, a relaxation exercise and reminders. Two prominent ways to determine the reminder-time are: a) ask users when they want to be reminded, and b) let an algorithm decide when to remind users. A minimal intervention prototype in the realm of sleep treatment was developed to test the effects of reminders on adherence. Reminders are a simple technique that could improve adherence. However, treatment adherence is still an issue. Previous studies report that computerized health interventions can be effective. The experiment presented in this paper investigated the effects of different kinds of reminders on adherence to automated parts of a cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) delivered via a mobile device.