Accepted Papers |
Call for Participation
The Value of a Critical Approach to Personal Health Informatics
Vera Khovanskaya, Stephen Voida, Phil Adams, Geri Gay, Eric P.S. Baumer
Personal health informatics systems present data to encourage healthy decision-making through self- knowledge. However, some consequences of these personal health informatics systems have cast doubt on the 'quantified self' movement: namely, difficulties with sustained engagement, concerns about whether these interfaces enable long-term behavior change, and narrowing the definition of 'healthiness' to easily quantifiable metrics. We propose three design strategies for personal health informatics and speculate on how they can begin to meet these concerns. We are exploring how a critical design approach can be used to shift the focus of personal informatics from quantifiable behavior change to changes in personal outlooks on health. In this workshop, we hope to discuss these strategies with other personal informatics researchers and work both to develop evaluation plans for critical informatics systems and to begin integrating critical design approaches into the design of conventional personal informatics systems.