PARC Coach - Enabling Healthy Behaviors

PARC Coach was a program that I designed while interning at Xerox PARC. The program helps users achieve their goals of consuming the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables per day using a psychological manipulation called self-affirmation exercises. Self-affirmation exercises are small tasks that participants engage in that allow users to reflect on the guiding values in their life, this in turn can increase health behavior change and acceptance of threatening health information. Unfortunately, no research had explored dosing effects of self-affirmation or how to translate it from the lab setting to the chaotic mobile space. My research bridged this transition and found dose-dependent effects of self-affirmation on health behavior change. We found that users in the condition receiving the highest dose of self-affirmation met their fruit and vegetable consumption goals 21% more than controls.