Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Behaviour change interventions are fundamental for effective implementation of policies and practices that target growing challenges such as self-management of chronic diseases, adhering to preventive behaviours like social distancing to reduce the spread of transmissible diseases, etc. However, regardless of the importance, achieving a sustainable behaviour change remains to be a challenge for researchers and practitioners. A potential means for addressing this challenge is to use digital technologies known as behaviour change support systems (BCSS). However, emerging solutions continue to show varying levels of effectiveness and are not sustainable over the long term. One of the issues is that current digital solutions do not address habit as a fundamental stage of sustained behaviour. For the purpose of this research, habit is defined as learned behaviour that is frequently repeated, has acquired a high degree of automaticity, and is cued in stable contexts. A better understanding of how to create and integrate habit formation principles into the design of a decision support system is crucial for providing long-term support for sustained behaviour change. My proposed research will address this need. The long-termvision of this research is to develop and operationalize a comprehensive architectural framework for designing the Habit Formation Support System (HFSS) that supports sustainable behaviour change in individuals. This research will employ the Design Science Research Methodology known for guiding the development of Information Systems artifacts to generate new knowledge for a class of systems' design. To design and develop an ontology, I will consider various methods, such as IDEF5 and Web Ontology Language. I will also use Protégé tool to create the ontology. In developing a representation of the interventions and formalizing assembling of these interventions, I will use Constraint Logic Programming and its Minizinc implementation. Finally, for the creation of the rest of the components and implementation of the architectural framework, I will apply the Organization-based Multiagent System Engineering method for multi-agent system design. This research will contribute to the field of decision support systems by proposing a novel architectural framework for the HFSS that directly incorporates behavioural design principles. The impact of this research program and its theoretical and empirical contributions are twofold. From a theoretical perspective, this research will demonstrate how to integrate habitual design into a decision support system design so it is possible to model and operationalize behavioural theories. At the practical level, this research will provide system designers with a design blueprint for creating habit formation decision support systems for different domains. Overall, the proposed research represents a step towards creating systems that directly address  users' need for supporting sustainable behaviour change.