Designing Virtual Characters in Digital Health Technologies: A Self-presence Perspective

Overweight and obesity represent major public health issues that affect more than 12.7 million children and adolescents. Health behavior change plays a critical role in self-managing obesity and overweight and can set the foundation for lifelong health for children and adolescents. Despite the potential of digital health technologies to help children and adolescents self-manage obesity and overweight, user engagement with DHTs, which plays a critical role in driving health behavior changes and improving health outcomes, remains low. One way to enhance user engagement with DHTs involves leveraging virtual characters through inducing self-presence among users. However, it is unclear how one can design virtual characters to achieve self-presence in DHTs to help children and adolescents self-manage obesity and overweight. The current study draws relevant data from a larger user-centered design science project to design a DHT that targets obese and overweight adolescents. We first derived relevant affordances pertinent to designing virtual characters through the self-presence perspective and then constructed design guidelines based on our findings. Further, we reviewed existing studies to determine potential support to further generalize our design guidelines. Based on our evidence, we propose design principles that can inform future efforts to design and assess virtual characters in DHTs. Developers and researchers who want to make DHTs more impactful in fostering healthier lifestyles among the youth should find our results useful.