NutritionAvatar: designing a future-self avatar for promotion of balanced, low-sodium diet intention: framework design and user study

Excessive salt intake is increasingly seen as global health threat. As contemporary education campaigns and current mHealth solutions only reach health literate users, an often unaffected minority, there exists demand for more inclusive solutions. Avatar-based health interventions have been shown effective in such a context, but have not been tested for promoting low-sodium dieting specifically. Therefore, we designed, implemented and tested a novel smartphone-mediated and future-self avatar-based sodium reduction intervention (N = 28). Because most consumers remain unaware of the relationship between sodium intake and high blood pressure, the system was also tailored to support users in gaining risk awareness and intention for low-sodium dieting. Results indicate that participants significantly increase outcome expectancy, risk awareness and intention towards balanced, low-sodium dieting. The majority of users identify themselves with the future-self avatar and confirm the system's usefulness, ease of use, enjoyment.