Exploring the Requirements and Design of Persuasive Intervention Technology to Combat Digital Addiction

Digital Addiction (DA) is an emerging behavioural phenomenon that denotes an obsessive and problematic usage of digital media. Such usage could meet various criteria of an addictive behaviour such as salience, conflict, tolerance and withdrawal symptoms and, hence, it would raise new challenges and ethical considerations on the way we engineer software. Luckily, software as a medium for such addictive usage could be also a medium for enacting a behaviour change and prevention strategy towards a regulated usage. However, due to the recentness of such software-based interventions, we still need a body of knowledge on how to develop them. In this paper, we conduct empirical research, through a diary study and an online forum content analysis, to understand users’ perception of such emerging systems. The results shed the light on a range of design aspects and risks when building and validating such persuasive intervention technology.