INTERNET OF BEHAVIOR (IoB) - AN ALTERNATIVE FOR DIFFERENTIATION IN THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

In recent years, a global health crisis has disrupted the lives of all people in a way that is difficult to manage; both at the individual and economic level, everything has changed; we all saw how difficult periods of restrictions alternated with those of relaxation and how the development of individual and professional lives changed sometimes even completely; also, we saw how the huge necessity appeared to move most of our activities from a real world, to a digital world, with many unknowns for a large part of people; in these conditions, the need for individuals to adapt to a life moved to the online environment, has intensified the need to develop a more robust, smarter and more specialized ITC infrastructure to support a world that is constantly migrating towards digitization; thus, intelligent technologies and new concepts and acronyms have imposed themselves in our lives, forcing us all to adapt and learn to use them and continue; thus, the use of IoT (Internet of Things), ML (Machine Learning), AI (Artificial Intelligence) solutions have become common; a mix of these technologies, together with the awareness and management of behavioral changes in times of crisis, increasingly imposed another technological concept, IoB (Internet Of Behavior); starting from these realities, a study was carried out regarding human behavioral changes in the digital environment in crisis conditions and which sought to obtain a complex image, made up of segments of transgenerational and international populations and comparing human behaviors in two types of periods, one of restrictions and another of relaxation in the pandemic; the analysis of the obtained data allowed the design of very complex profiles of users of the digital environment, with similar behaviors, but also remarkable differences; we consider that the obtained results can provide important informational support for companies from all industries, so that they can understand and use IoB applications, in order to be able to design sets of strategies for sustainable development, in times of crisis, as well as competitive differentiation solutions.

Article history: Received 28 June 2022; Revised 25 July 2022; Accepted 10 August 2022; Available online 25 October 2022; Available print 25 November 2022.

JEL classification: L86, M15