Ontological Review of Persuasion Support Systems (PSS) for Health Behavior Change through Physical Activity

Persuasion Support Systems (PSS) for health behavior change can play an important role in promoting health and well-being through physical activity. It is an emerging application at the crossroad between information systems, persuasion, and healthcare. We propose an ontology to systematically and systemically describe the construct of PSS for health behavior change. The ontology deconstructs the construct into its constituent dimensions and elements, and assembles them into a complete, parsimonious description of the same. We then map the corpus of literature on PSS for health behavior change through physical activity onto the ontology. The resulting ontological map highlights the research topics that are highly- and lightly-emphasized, as well as those with little or no emphasis. It illuminates the landscape of research in the corpus; it highlights biases in emphases that can help and hinder the advancement of the corpus. It can be used to develop a roadmap for future research.