Careables: Self tracking of subjective experiences by means of healthcare wearables.
The concept and realisation of Careables is one of the design contributions to the Interreg funded Prometheus project:
The objective of Careables is to allow patients to communicate subjective sensations such as nausea, thirst, sugar-craving, sleep quality, pain or… Experiences and symptoms that are crucial to understand the patients conditions and potential prospective changes in treatment. The sensations are communicated to a healthcare employed coach seated at a hospital.
The coach plays an active role in facilitating the design of the careables, and how to make sense of the recordings. This is done in collaboration with the patient and the designers for the careables.
Interactive Interiors – balancing power in doctor-patient consultations
The overall design intervention was explored as a semi-fixed feature space using the interactive table and its properties to foster specific distances and orientations and encourage/discourage certain interaction mechanisms between the different stakeholders in the consultation. The prototype developed for the design intervention consist of an interactive table comprising a set of shared resources: 1) an audio recorder and 2) a set of physical tokens that can be used as means for structuring the consultation in a collaborative manner. The audio recording is activated by flipping a circular pad accessible by both patient and doctor Figure 3: Overview of interaction possibilities with the different resources provided by the interactive table.(1 and 2). Flipping the microphone back will likewise stop the audio recording. A set of physical tokens each labelled with a concern often encountered during consultations e.g. “Treatment”, “Averse-effects”, “Everyday-life”. Flipping a category will stage it in an upright position Figure 3: Overview of interaction possibilities with the different resources provided by the interactive table. (3 and 4) and make the category visible as the current topic of conversation. Positioning the token in the up-right position will furthermore bookmark the audio recording with that topic. All resources in the table are accessible to both doctor and patient inviting to be discussed and handled in collaboration as they become relevant in the consultation. In the current version of the prototype photo resistors connected to an Arduino Leonard registers activation of the different resources and connects to a Raspberry Pi, which handles the audio recording and uploads it to a server for later remote retrieval. As such the table maybe considered a large interface for collective audio recording.
The overall shape of the table (marked by a green contour) primarily seeks to produce interactional engagement between participant A (doctor) and F (patient), and secondly between participant A (doctor) and E (relative). By its triangular quarter-circular shape the table incorporates spatial features with its rounded shape as well as placement and orientation of the resources in the table top. These features are by size and layout designed to regulate the distance and orientation of the participants, spurring desired proxemic relations. The model used here is Lawson’s adoption of Hall’s original description of dialogue as it evolves around a table fitted with our (green contoured) table shape.
