PerKApp: A general purpose persuasion architecture for healthy lifestyles

[Display omitted] •A general architecture integrating persuasive technologies.•Persuasive technologies are used to motivate people in following healthy lifestyles.•Persuasive strategies merged with knowledge bases to support users behavioral change.•Platform deployed within a real-world (Workplace Health Promotion) use case.•Results demonstrated the platform effectiveness within the diet domain. Automatically monitoring and supporting healthy lifestyle is a recent research trend, fostered by the availability of low-cost monitoring devices, and it can significantly contribute to the prevention of chronic diseases deriving from incorrect diet and lack of physical activity. In this paper, we present a general purpose architecture for persuasion scenarios and behavioral change. The architecture is designed to be easily portable across languages and domains and has been implemented and evaluated in a specific system for Workplace Health Promotion (WHP) called PerKApp. PerKApp provides a fully fledged platform supporting the remote monitoring of workers lifestyle by providing real-time feedback through persuasive context-based messages when necessary.