Motivating people in smart environments

In this paper we discuss the possibility to extend PORTIA, a persuasion system currently applied in human-agent dialogs, to support ambient persuasion. We have identified a fitness center as an appropriate smart environment in which ambient persuasion strategies can be applied. According to the Ubiquitous Computing vision, in the fitness center the user is surrounded by several connected devices that cooperate in the persuasion process, each of them with the most appropriate strategy, mode of persuasion, style of communication and ability of exploiting the kairos principle. To this aim we propose a multi-agent system able to support this distributed and intelligent approach to persuasion that allows to follow the user during the gradual change from the initial attitude to sustain of long term behaviours.