Goal-setting is often used in eHealth applications for behavior change as it motivates and helps to stay focused on a desired outcome. However, for goals to be effective, they need to meet criteria such as being specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (SMART). Moreover, people need to be confident to reach their goal. We thus created a goal-setting dialog in which the virtual coach Jody guided people in setting SMART goals. Thereby, Jody provided personalized vicarious experiences by showing examples from other people who reached a goal to increase people’s confidence. These experiences were personalized, as it is helpful to observe a relatable other succeed. Data from an online study with a between-subjects with pre-post measurement design (n=39 participants) provide credible support that personalized experiences are seen as more motivating than generic ones. Motivational factors for participants included information about the goal, path to the goal, and the person who accomplished a goal, as well as the mere fact that a goal was reached. Participants also had a positive attitude toward Jody. We see these results as an indication that people are positive toward using a goal-setting dialog with a virtual coach in eHealth applications for behavior change. Moreover, contrary to hypothesized, our observed data give credible support that participants’ self-efficacy was lower after the dialog than before. These results warrant further research on how such dialogs affect self-efficacy, especially whether these lower post-measurements of self-efficacy are associated with people’s more realistic assessment of their abilities. ... Read more

Lack of physical activity is one of the main risk factors for the development of cardiovascular diseases. Although most people are aware of the risks of this poor health behavior, they have a hard time improving this behavior. Goal-setting is an effective step in the process of changing behavior. It can motivate a person and help them to remain focused on the desired outcome, which increases the chance of successfully achieving a goal. In this thesis, we studied the design of a goal-setting dialogue for a virtual coach to motivate people in the context of physical activity. The dialogue was designed to support people in setting SMART goals and to raise their self-efficacy. Part of the design was vicarious experiences in the form of examples of people who successfully achieved a physical activity goal. We gathered these examples and fit a model to predict which examples to show to a user during the conversation with the virtual coach. An experiment was conducted to evaluate whether there was an increase in users' self-efficacy after the conversation with the virtual coach, how motivating the given examples were, and users' attitudes towards the virtual coach. The results indicated that users' self-efficacy was lower after the interaction with the virtual coach. However, we found that people considered the given examples motivating and had a positive attitude toward the virtual coach. ... Read more

bunq is an internationally active digital bank. At the moment, the bunq app is only available in English, Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish. Their goal is to be a worldwide player. To be able to fulfil this goal, their app should be available in multiple languages. In the past, the translation process took an unnecessary large amount of time. Due to this inefficiency in the process, the client, bunq, gave the team an assignment to create an application which helps to decrease the workload and time spent on translating. The application should solve the following issues: (1) translating the strings is time-consuming; (2) developers lose time by having to copy and paste the strings into the code; (3) inconsistency mistakes between the apps are made when inserting the strings into the code; (4) translations might be incorrect; (5) fluent speakers are needed for each language.
The final product is a web application that solves the main issues of decreasing the workload and time spent on translating. ... Read more