MINI REVIEW article
Front. Digit. Health
Sec. Health Communications and Behavior Change
Persuasive technologies for modifying food habits: A review of mindless, reflective, and social approaches to eating behavior change
University of Turin, Turin, Italy
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Abstract
Eating habits are central to health and well-being, yet promoting lasting dietary change remains extremely challenging. In recent years, persuasive technologies have emerged as potential supports, leveraging personal data made available by mobile and wearable devices to provide targeted behavioral interventions. However, research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) highlights that these systems often fail to sustain people's engagement over time and may overlook the subjective, personal, and context-dependent nature of behavior change. Through an analysis of papers on persuasive technologies for healthy eating published at the ACM CHI Conference over the last ten years (2016–2025), this review maps the landscape of current digital instruments aimed at modifying people's eating habits, identifying several limitations: designs scarcely address the internal aspects of change, foster user agency, or account for the contextual and life factors that are central to behavior modification. In this sense, an alternative approach that values the subjective and existential aspects of the process of change could be explored in future research.
Summary
Keywords
behavior change, Eating, Food, Persuasive technologies, self-tracking
Received
20 November 2025
Accepted
17 February 2026
Copyright
© 2026 Rapp. 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: Amon Rapp
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.