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Introduction: There are particular challenges when designing and developing a digital coaching application aimed at providing person-tailored support for lifestyle changes in multiple domains to promote health. This study explored how a participatory design process addresses challenges that materialised in a multicomponent lifestyle intervention, providing an understanding of the onboarding experience and early user engagement.

Method: A participatory design methodology was applied involving a multidisciplinary team of 12 domain experts and different groups of end users in design cycles, model construction, prototyping, and evaluation. The process followed a design methodology for argument-based health information systems and a framework for layered interactive adaptive systems to engage domain experts in the development of aspects relating to the interactivity of the system. A qualitative user study was conducted with eight participants, five regular users and three nurses, focussing on the onboarding phase.

Results: Contributions of this article are (i) the StarCoach, the person-tailored health-promotion intervention for multiple health behaviours supporting short and long-term goals; (ii) a framework for studying multicomponent lifestyle interventions with multiple behaviour change techniques (BCTs); and (iii) qualitative results regarding usage, adherence to, and perceived effects of the intervention with a focus on the initial phase of using the application. The five regular participants reported increased health-promoting activities during the onboarding phase and were using already habituated activities to establish a routine to use the intervention.

Conclusion: The participatory design led to StarCoach embedding clusters of BCTs, which build a framework for research on multicomponent lifestyle interventions. Whether using already habituated activities to establish a routine to use the intervention could be a strategy to increase adherence and engagement in the onboarding phase and beyond will be a focus in future studies. The participants also showed increased engagement in their chosen lifestyle-change activities during the study period. The findings will be followed up in future studies to evaluate the effects on behaviour over a longer period of time.

This paper presents a survey of software for computational argumentation, focusing on tools and libraries that can be re-used for building applications. The (so far preliminary) survey is intended as a continuously updated resource that researchers and potential practitioners can refer to when selecting tools for their argumentation use cases. The survey results indicate that while a plethora of argumentation tools exist, covering various formal argumentation approaches, the software engineering maturity of the tool ecosystem is low. For example, while many tools are openly available, few are properly documented and covered by automated tests. We argue that many of these shortcomings can be straightforwardly addressed by following simple engineering practices if community consensus regarding basic requirements for software artifacts can be established, as is the case in software engineering-oriented communities.

This article presents an empirical requirement elicitation study for an argumentation-based digital companion for supporting behavior change, whose ultimate goal is the promotion and facilitation of healthy behavior. The study was conducted with non-expert users as well as with health experts and was in part supported by the development of prototypes. It focuses on human-centric aspects, in particular user motivations, as well as on expectations and perceptions regarding the role and interaction behavior of a digital companion. Based on the results of the study, a framework for person tailoring the agent's roles and behaviors, and argumentation schemes are proposed. The results indicate that the extent to which a digital companion argumentatively challenges or supports a user's attitudes and chosen behavior and how assertive and provocative the companion is may have a substantial and individualized effect on user acceptance, as well as on the effects of interacting with the digital companion. More broadly, the results shed some initial light on the perception of users and domain experts of “soft,” meta-level aspects of argumentative dialogue, indicating potential for future research.