Human-AI Collaboration to Promote Trust, Engagement and Adaptation in the Process of Pro-environmental and Health Behaviour Change

Abstract

A necessary step in the digitalization of our environments is to include the users in the decision loop, following a more human-centric paradigm. Such an aproach will make their interactions with surrounding technology closer to them. Therefore, there is a recurrent need in contemporary technological solutions to create proposals to assist users in a way that is not exclusive to them and makes them feel integrated into the intelligent system. In fact, this is particularly relevant when the proposed technology or system aims to nudge users to form, shape, or change their daily behaviours. In essence, solutions designed for assisting users in that matter need to consider the inclusion of humans in the learning/decision loop and still the literature in the field is scarce. In this work, we identify and address three crucial human requirements that this technology has to integrate to promote a comfortable and long-term use of technology for the effective assistance of behaviour change: trust, engagement, and adaptation. Besides, we propose a collaborative workflow based on hybrid intelligent systems to cover the lack of human requirements and needs of traditional approaches. In essence, this work aims to shed light on how to promote closer collaboration between humans and intelligent agents for behaviour change under the principle that people should not be treated as mere users of technologies and services, but their behaviour should become one of the critical levers for designing and using technologies. That is, creating a closer interaction between these technologies and people.