Nudging to Change, the Role of Digital Health

Abstract

The use of nudges, i.e., design changes in the way choices are presented to steer users towards predetermined choices, has dramatically increased over the last few years. These interventions have moved online to become digital and are present across many fields from politics to healthcare. As the use of these mechanisms in healthcare has grown exponentially recently, it is crucial to understand the opportunities they offer and the risks they pose. However, at this stage, such an analysis is lacking. This chapter specifically addresses this issue by (1) analyzing how digital nudges can be applied in the continuum of care and (2) mapping the current empirical research landscape on the topic. To do so, this chapter presents a scoping review of the literature by searching relevant research in the electronic database of JMIR (Journal of Medical Internet Research). The search yielded 150 unique articles, of which 19 articles satisfied the criteria for inclusion in this study. The results indicate that feedback and reminders are the most commonly used digital nudges for behavior change in digital health. Moreover, the results show that most digital nudges research focuses on prevention and the postacute phase of the continuum of care, with none of the studies investigating nudges for the acute phase. Finally, the results indicate that current empirical research on digital nudging in healthcare rarely discusses ethical considerations.

Peer-to-peer sharing in public health interventions: strategies when people share health-related personal information on social media

“…Rather than simply technological ignorance or unfamiliarity with social media, the dilemmas included social notions of privacy and identity that comprised the uncertainties involved in participants’ relations to social media. Because of this, it is likely that the perceived dilemmas are not easily resolved by “nudging” or educational efforts, strategies that have been suggested and used to increase people’s engagement in online interventions (e.g., Azzopardi-Muscat & Sørensen, 2019 ; Purohit et al, 2023 ). Not only the dilemmas themselves, but also the strategies that were used to resolve them, appeared to be potentially counterproductive, creating meaning around health work that either did not reach the parts of people’s networks that would benefit from it, or constituted health work as non-serious and unimportant.…”