Persuading People to Fight Dengue and Sustaining It via Mobile Application

The challenge to dengue prevention lies in sustaining the preventive activity among the community, which commonly occurs periodically, i.e., when there are dengue outbreaks, with health officers under the Communication for Behavioural Impact (COMBI) campaign. In this paper, a mobile application is specifically developed based on the COMBI Behavioural Change model, which focuses on persuading users to adopt and sustain new habits. The application was carefully designed to reflect the stages of behavioural change. Combining both quantitative and qualitative approaches, an experiment was performed over a four-week study with eight participants, and based on the empirical findings, it is found that with careful design, users can be persuaded to take up the new habit. Two traits that are deemed important are understanding the ‘why’, and the trait of being responsible citizens. In addition, at the end of the study, users felt comfortable continuing with the cleaning activities without the application. Thus, more thoughts should be considered for the application to remain relevant in the sustainable phase.