With technologies such as wearables becoming increasingly accessible to all parties of the healthcare sector, the possibilities to use this promising technology - to assist healthcare professionals in engaging and supporting patients with chronic illness and relatives - expand. The project focus on designing personal technologies for recording health-related experiences among patients suffering from diabetes and prostate cancer and enable patients to share this data with healthcare professionals.
Getting ill (with cancer) “is not a single stressful event, [but] rather is characterized as a series of multiple, interwoven, and layered psychosocial transitions”, during which a patient and relatives continuously are trying to adapt to the new situation (Lewis, 1993). This adaptation does not always succeed and may end in denial (Bailey et al., 2007), uncertainty (Wallace, 2003) and anxiety that may affect their functioning and quality of life negatively (Litwin et al., 1995). A crucial prerequisite for the patient’s ability to change their situation is motivation. This motivation, that can be both intrinsic and extrinsic (Ryan and Deci, 2000), is primarily enabled through insight into and thoughts on their current situation. Something that is difficult to achieve through a booklet. While the health services are already attempting to assist the patient with regard to this, the health professionals do not have the ability or time to be ubiquitous throughout the patients every day.
Gitte Pihl and colleagues (Pihl et al., 2018) propose that improving the patients’ consciousness about own lifestyle through self-tracking may be an initial step in improving lifestyle and thereby wellbeing and quality of life among prostate cancer patients. Melissa Scollan-Koliopoulos and colleagues (2013) support this finding; they found that acceptance of one’s illness may improve health outcomes and that this acceptance is a prerequisite to problem-solving in patient’s illness through strategies of coping and self-care. Ian Li, Anind Dey and Jodi Forlizzi (2011) supports this further in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) literature; they find that “to design tools that effectively assist self- reflection”, designers and researchers need to understand what kind of questions people have in relation to data, as well as how they ask and answer them.
Use of personal health technology for domestic use is poorly understood (Crabtree and Rodden, 2004). Several researchers have however presented challenges and issues that need to be considered, when designing personal health technology, to make sure that technologies fit into the lifestyle of the individual (Ballegaard et al., 2008). The project hypothesizes that personal health technologies such as wearables for healthcare (careables) have the potential to assist the patient in adapting to the new situation, mitigate the problems caused by the one-size-fits-allness of current tools such as booklets. And instead, be designed to fit into the individual’s domestic routines and the way they relate to self-tracked data.
