Health Promotion: Patient Self-Management, Cognitive Work Analysis, and Persuasive Design

The patient work of self-management is composed of self-activation, planning, and maintenance of a variety of health promotion behaviors, such as health information and service seeking, medication adherence, symptoms management, decision-making, and health habit formation. Human factors and ergonomics methods focus on analyzing current sociotechnical systems and enhancing their safety and efficiency. The Health Belief Model (HBM) explains the adoption of health behavior based on six factors related to risk assessments of boththe threats to prevent and the preventive (health) behavior to adopt. The Social Cognitive Theory explains and predicts the changes of attitudes or behavior depending on the beliefs about the self to perform certain tasks or behavior, also called self-efficacy. The avoidance of harms, along with self-efficacy, is relevant to the intention to adopt health behavior. The Transtheoretical Model defines behavior change as a process involving five stages, each associated with different levels of preparedness, intentions, and likelihood of behavioral change.