Persuasive technologies for modifying food habits: a review of mindless, reflective, and social approaches to eating behavior change

Eating habits are central to health and well-being, yet promoting lasting dietary change remains extremely challenging. In recent years, persuasive technologies have emerged as potential supports, leveraging personal data made available by mobile and wearable devices to provide targeted behavioral interventions. However, research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) highlights that these systems often fail to sustain people's engagement over time and may overlook the subjective, personal, and context-dependent nature of behavior change. Through an analysis of papers on persuasive technologies for healthy eating published at the ACM CHI Conference over the last ten years (2016-2025), this review maps the landscape of current digital instruments aimed at modifying people's eating habits, identifying several limitations: designs scarcely address the internal aspects of change, foster user agency, or account for the contextual and life factors that are central to behavior modification. In this sense, an alternative approach that values the subjective and existential aspects of the process of change could be explored in future research.