The aim of nudging is to gently push people towards changing their behavior according to some nudging goal, for example, to encourage healthier or environmentally friendlier behavior. This implies influencing people’s behavior towards decisions that are beneficial for society, but usually also in the individual’s long-term interest. Nudging is about influencing decisions and behavior using suggestions, positive reinforcement and other non-coercive means, so as to achieve socially desirable outcomes.
The project’s focus is designing personalized nudges in a digital environment, where guidance of user behavior is tailored, to be relevant to the current situation and context of each individual user. A main research question in the project is “How to develop, deliver and present personalized and context-aware digital nudges that can influence peoples’ decisions and behavior in a non-coercive and ethical manner?”
The project presents a smart nudging system that monitors the user’s activities, interests, and surroundings, and creates tailored nudges to help the user change behavior towards a nudging goal. Such a personalized and context-aware nudge provides the user with a suggested activity and a gentle influence to make the user follow the suggestion.
The Nudge project involves many aspects of computer science, including information collection from multiple sources (e.g. online sources, IoT devices, and crowd sourced information), data management, data analysis, personalization, motivation, recommendation, and visualization.