Obesity is a complex problem worldwide. This chronic condition has many different causes. One of them is emotional eating. In about 40% of overweight people, emotional eating plays a major role. Emotional eating is the tendency to (over)eat in response to negative emotions such as stress or irritability. The target group is at a distance from care - due to shame they do not dare to seek help. Within the mental health services there are long waiting lists.The goal of this dissertation is to gain knowledge to support emotional eaters in coping with emotional eating behavior in a self-help setting that is appropriate to the time and context. To achieve this, we need to better understand the needs of emotional eaters in terms of virtual coaching and self-management. We formulated the following research question, "How can virtual coaching facilitate emotional eaters to cope with self-management of their emotional eating behavior?"Knowledge was gathered about their wishes regarding virtual support. Based on this, personas were developed, labeled with emotions, that give shape to the two prototypical problem situations of the emotional eater: 1) experiencing cravings, and 2) giving in to those cravings through binge or overeating.Participants recognized themselves in the problem situations presented, and that there is a need for virtual coaching and for greater understanding of one's own emotions and emotion regulation skills.Research was conducted on the possibilities surrounding the customized delivery of exercises in emotion regulation, which revealed that people mentioned the potential of the exercises, but that their presentation needed improvement.Virtual coaching is potentially successful for this group; participants showed themselves to be accessible and visible; there was openness and outspokenness by the participants about situations presented, etc.; there was goodwill towards digital coaching and doing exercises; the participants also showed themselves to be competent in doing exercises independently.The chance of success with regard to the development of a virtual coach has increased because the target group is open to virtual coaching where future users can work independently with their problems.
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Objectives: Emotional eating is recognized as a potential contributor to weight gain. Emotional eaters often hide their problems because of feelings of shame about their behavior, making it challenging to provide them with the necessary support. The introduction of a virtual coach might offer a potential solution in assisting them. To find out whether emotional eaters are receptive to online personalized coaching, we presented emotional eaters with two essential proto-typical problem situations for emotional eaters: “experiencing cravings” and “after giving in to cravings,” and asked them whether they preferred one of the three coaching strategies presented: Validating, Focus-on-Change and Dialectical.Methods: An experimental vignette study (2 × 3 design) was carried out. The vignettes featured two distinct personas, each representing one of the two common problem scenarios experienced by emotional eaters, along with three distinct coaching strategies for each scenario. To identify potential predictors for recognition of problem situations, questionnaires on emotional eating (DEBQ), personality traits (Big-5), well-being (PANAS), and BMI were administrated.Results: A total of 62% of the respondents identified themselves with “after giving in to cravings” and 47% with “experiencing cravings.” BMI, emotional eating and emotional stability appeared to be predictors in recognizing both the problem situations. In “experiencing cravings,” the participating women preferred Dialectical and the Validation coaching strategies. In the “after giving in to cravings” condition, they revealed a preference for the Dialectical and the Focus-on-Change coaching strategies.Conclusion: Using vignettes allowed a less threatening way of bringing up sensitive topics for emotional eaters. The personas representing the problem situations were reasonably well recognized. To further enhance this recognition, it is important for the design and content of the personas to be even more closely related to the typical problem scenarios of emotional eaters, rather than focusing on physical characteristics or social backgrounds. This way, users may be less distracted by these factors. With the knowledge gained about the predictors that may influence recognition of the problem situations, design for coaching can be more customized. The participants represented individuals with high emotional eating levels, enhancing external validity.
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Self-management is widely seen as a viable contribution to sustainable health care as it allows to promote physical and mental well-being. A promising approach to promoting a healthy lifestyle is the deployment of personalized virtual coaches, especially in combination with the latest developments in the fields of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. This paper presents a framework for a virtual coaching system, as well as a use case in which parts of this framework are applied. The virtual coach in the use case aims to encourage customer contact center employees to protect their mental health. This article outlines one part of the use-case in particular, viz. how to promote employee autonomy and supervisor support by, inter alia, monitoring employees’ levels of emotional exhaustion. Current systems focus on providing users with insight in their health status or behavior, the authors developed the functional architecture for a system that can be implemented for different goals and generates personalized, real-time advice based on the combination of user preferences, motivational success and predicted user behavior.
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