Abstract
Tobacco smoking and vaping remain a global public health concern, causing millions of premature deaths and imposing substantial economic losses. In spite of persistent efforts to combat the health risks, smoking continues to persist, necessitating the exploration of innovative interventions or technology solutions such as mobile applications, wearables, virtual reality, and more. Despite being included in public health programs worldwide, vaping or smoking awareness and/or cessation campaigns face barriers as they pertain to scalability and accessibility. Virtual reality (VR) experiences could potentially contribute towards remedial programs, but virtual reality experiences, that cater for both pre-vaping awareness, cessation and post cessation awareness, are scarce. Co-design, involving public health policy makers and subject matter experts is crucial for creating meaningful technology solutions. However, few researchers have explored this approach in VR contexts, despite its potential for authentic public health campaign support. Recognizing the need for a holistic approach, this paper used a co-design approach, collaborating with public health policy makers and subject matter experts to design and evaluate a VR experience for the contexts of pre-vaping, cessation and post cessation awareness. In this paper, we present necessary design guidelines and an evaluation framework for the creation of virtual reality experiences in persuasive computing contexts for public health.
Fatima Adem, Noor Alsaadoun, Areej Al-Wabil: These authors contributed equally to this work as co-first authors.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our colleagues in the MIT Solve program at Alfaisal University and the CoCreate program for their thoughtful discussions and feedback. Research assisted by Alfaisal University's Solve grant for 2023.
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Adem, F., Alsaadoun, N., Elsayed, H., Al-Wabil, A. (2023). Design Considerations for Virtual Reality (VR) Vaping Applications: Co-Designing Persuasive Computing Scenarios. In: Gao, Q., Zhou, J., Duffy, V.G., Antona, M., Stephanidis, C. (eds) HCI International 2023 – Late Breaking Papers. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14055. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48041-6_31
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