Paper Reading #4: There's A Monster In My Kitchen: Using Aversive Feedback to Motivate Behaviour Change

Commentary

See what I have to say about Keith's and Adam's work.

References

Kirman, B., et al. (2010). There's a monster in my kitchen: using aversive feedback to motivate behaviour change. Proceeding of the Acm conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2685-2694). Atlanta: http://www.sigchi.org/chi2010/.

Article Summary

Kirman and his colleagues seek to incorporate some of the discoveries of behavioral psychology into a project in HCI that they call the Nag-baztag. The idea behind this system is to not only monitor power usage but provide feedback to the user in what they hope to be a more psychologically efficacious manner. The team outlines the concepts of positive and negative reinforcement, and how they will present each stimulus to the users of this system. In particular, the team aims to focus on aversive stimuli, such as punishment, for incorrectly performed behaviors or inconsiderate power usage. They address a concern about the applicability of a generalized psychological approach to different users by making their system adaptive, in that it will compare power usage statistics and how it thinks the user should respond based on the stimuli he has received and try to adjust its tactics to gain the desired result.

The system will deliver its stimuli to the user in the form of verbal comments, mostly as punishment for improper or imprudent use of power to perform everyday tasks in a kitchen. All electronic devices and even the sink will be monitored for usage. The system will "nag" the user for their poor choices in power management, and can interact with the user via Facebook, Twitter, or SMS. The system will be given enough control over the environment so as to be able to restrict the use of devices which have a history of improper use, or even take actions that will deliver negative consequences to the user in a real-life situation, such as not allowing the stove or the faucet to be used.

Discussion

I think that this is an interesting concept that might only see a very limited market. If you are given control over whether or not the system is in the house, what is stopping you from just pulling the plug when you get tired of hearing it complain? Granted, you never would have bought the system in the first place if you were not actually planning on using it, but it seems like it would take a very determined and motivated person to deal with not being able to use their sink or stove because of some angry appliance to not shut it off.

An angry refrigerator.

That being said, it is curious why they chose to go with punishment over reward. Research has shown positive reinforcement to be much more efficacious in creating lasting behavioral changes over punishment. This is not to say that a little reminder every now and again would not be warranted, e.g. "You used too much water in the kettle this time." I understand their desire not to focus directly on negative reinforcement for the obvious reason, but maybe if a more holistic analysis of the space was taken into account, they would be able to streamline every aspect of the environment and remove the need for an adaptive system. For example:

• Positive reinforcement: praise for using the optimal amount of water in the kettle for a cup of tea
• Negative reinforcement: a buzzer sounds continuously while the kettle is left on too long until it is removed
• Punishment: scolding for using too much water in the kettle
• Omission: the stove will not heat up as fast as a result of consistently using too much water

This sort of thinking could be applied to the whole system without too much more overhead as far as implementation goes (as far as I can tell, in any case). It seems the user might respond better to something like this that only to punishment.