PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Human-Robot Interaction
Toward Personalized Persuasive Social Robots for Behavior Change in Healthcare: A Conceptual Framework
Provisionally accepted
- Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Naples, Italy
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This paper presents a conceptual framework for the design of personalized persuasive conversational agents to support positive behavior change. This paper leverages key theoretical models to understand the determinants of behavior change and explores how these models can inform the design of personalized conversational agents to enhance their effectiveness in healthcare interventions. The role of personalization in dialogue-based intervention is discussed, emphasizing the importance of adaptation to individual characteristics, preferences, and contexts. The potential of persuasive language generation is also examined, highlighting its ability to create more engaging and impactful behavior change strategies. Finally, the paper proposes a layered framework that explicitly links behavioral models, user personalization, and persuasive language generation, and discusses future research directions for integrating this framework in social robots’ interventions for behavior change in healthcare.
Keywords: behavior change, Conversation system, framework, human-robot interaction, Personalization, persuasion
Received: 03 Dec 2025; Accepted: 11 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Maalouly, Rossi and Rossi. 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: Elie Maalouly
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