Designing Persuasive avatars in mhealth for arabic culture: A qualitative study

Mobile health, or mHealth in short, concerns using mobile devices to provide health information to users. Research has shown that the use of avatars within mHealth applications can improve health outcomes. While several studies have investigated the design of avatars for mHealth applications, these studies focused solely on western cultures and most of them have not considered whether design principles are different between Western and Arabic users. This work will investigate the design of Arabic avatars by conducting a qualitative study, which includes semi-structured interviews with multiple stakeholders. The study will adopt a co-design methodology to derive design principles for persuasive Arabic avatars in the context of mHealth. In particular, it is our aim to increase users' perceived social presence and intention to use persuasive mHealth avatars by taking Arabic culture into consideration. The work may lead to a higher level of adoption of avatar-based mHealth applications in Arabic countries.