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PERSPECTIVE article

Front. Digit. Health

Sec. Health Communications and Behavior Change

Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fdgth.2025.1544185

This article is part of the Research Topic AI for Health Behavior Change View all articles

A Human-Centered Perspective on Research Challenges for Hybrid Human Artificial Intelligence in Lifestyle and Behavior Change Support

Provisionally accepted
  • 1 Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
  • 2 University of Oulu, Oulu, Northern Ostrobothnia, Finland
  • 3 University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States
  • 4 TNO, Soesterberg, Netherlands
  • 5 Malmö University, Malmö, Skåne, Sweden
  • 6 Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • 7 Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands
  • 8 University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    As intelligent systems become more integrated into people's daily life, systems designed to facilitate lifestyle and behavior change for health and well-being have also become more common. Previous work has identified challenges in the development and deployment of such AI-based support for diabetes lifestyle management and shown that it is necessary to shift the design process of AI-based support systems towards a human-centered approach that can be addressed by hybrid intelligence (HI). However, this shift also means adopting a user-centric design process, which brings its own challenges in terms of stakeholder involvement, evaluation processes and ethical concerns. In this perspective paper, we aim to more comprehensively identify challenges and future research directions in the development of HI systems for behavior change from four different viewpoints: 1) challenges on an individual level, such as understanding the individual enduser's context 2) challenges on an evaluation level, such as evaluation pipelines and identifying success criteria and 3) challenges in addressing ethical implications. We show that developing HI systems for behavior change is an interdisciplinary process that requires further collaboration and consideration from various fields.

    Keywords: human computer interaction, Hybrid intelligence, behavior change, healthcare, Support system

    Received: 12 Dec 2024; Accepted: 05 Mar 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Hao, Uusitalo, Figueroa, Smit, Strange, Chang, Ribeiro, Nana, Tielman and de Boer. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Chenxu Hao, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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