Encouraging Each Other in the Community Site for Habit Development

Abstract

We have developed a prototype community site for building up a good habit. A user can join in the prototype site together with a family or a close friend as a partner, and thereby the user and the partner can encourage each other while they receive an alarm of the beginning of the plan to practice the objective activity. In this paper, we discuss the effect of encouragement for habit development from the results of an evaluation experiment. The results of the short-term experiment were not so good. However, it suggested that a user should send an encouragement message to the partner that has low motivation.