The design of persuasive prompts to induce behavioural change through an mHealth application for people with depression

The alteration of an individual's lifestyle and the adoption of healthy behaviours have been shown to be effective in combating a majority of the major symptoms of depression. While there are several mHealth applications that use behaviour change to reduce depressive symptoms, they are often not grounded in behaviour change theory and display a lack of understanding regarding the specific factors that lead to behaviour change. Therefore, there is a need to test innovative strategies to tackle the issue. One such strategy is the use of behaviour change theories to design mHealth applications that use persuasive prompts to assist in 'prompting' the user to adopt healthier behaviours. In this paper, we present the design of persuasive prompts and an mHealth application to induce behavioural change, followed by the results of two studies: (i) an acceptability study that tested the acceptability of the persuasive prompts and (ii) a usability study of the mHealth application. The results show that there is a significant difference in which behaviour change theories users prefer based on their level of depression and that overall, users have a positive perception of the application.