Design and Evaluation of OnlinePal: A Digital Behavior Change Intervention to Support Healthy Internet Use and Parental Mediation

We introduce OnlinePal, a dual-app digital behavior intervention aimed at children and their parents. The intervention incorporates five persuasive components including goal-setting, game-like missions, achievement recognition, planning, and monitoring.

We conducted a mixed-methods evaluation involving 12 parent–child dyads and three healthcare professionals through task-based walkthroughs followed by interviews and System Usability Scale ratings. The mean SUS score for OnlinePal is 73.33, corresponding to a satisfactory level of perceived usability. Participants appreciated the engaging and structured approach but identified three interaction-level challenges likely to impact adoption: perceived decision burden during initial configuration, inability to form a cohesive mental model of interactions between goals, missions, and rewards, and children’s resistance to automated restrictions that disrupt existing activities.