An Evaluation of Wellness Assessment Visualizations for Older Adults

Abstract

Background: Smart home technologies provide a valuable resource to unobtrusively monitor health and wellness within an older adult population. However, the breadth and density of data available along with aging associated decreases in working memory, prospective memory, spatial cognition, and processing speed can make it challenging to comprehend for older adults. We developed visualizations of smart home health data integrated into a framework of wellness. We evaluated the visualizations through focus groups with older adults and identified recommendations to guide the future development of visualizations. Materials and Methods: We conducted four focus groups with older adult participants (n = 31) at an independent retirement community. Participants were presented with three different visualizations from a wellness pilot study. A qualitative descriptive analysis was conducted to identify thematic content. Results: We identified three themes related to processing and application of visualizations: (1) values of visualizations for wellness assessment, (2) cognitive processing approaches to visualizations, and (3) integration of health data for visualization. In addition, the focus groups highlighted key design considerations of visualizations important towards supporting decision-making and evaluation assessments within integrated health displays. Conclusions: Participants found inherent value in having visualizations available to proactively engage with their healthcare provider. Integrating the visualizations into a wellness framework helped reduce the complexity of raw smart home data. There has been limited work on health visualizations from a consumer perspective, in particular for an older adult population. Creating appropriately designed visualizations is valuable towards promoting consumer involvement within the shared decision-making process of care.

A Task-Data Taxonomy for Health Data Visualizations: Web-Based Survey with Experts and Older Adults

“…Data analysts, scientists, and statistical experts have been among the primary users of data visualization to date [14], but digitization of health services together with demographic change [15] and the recently observable shift toward patient empowerment are leading to an increase in the number of older adults without special background knowledge using data visualizations [16][17][18][19][20][21]. Accordingly, research on the visualization of health data is increasingly taking into account the perspective of older adults for design and evaluation [22][23][24].…”

A Comparison of Health Visualization Evaluation Techniques with Older Adults

“…As part of a participatory design framework, we have developed and evaluated static visualization mockups of health data [1]. We designed the visualizations to provide an overview of wellness and its distribution into components of health.…”

“…The data collection method varied and included physiological measurements, self--reported questionnaires, and cognitive games [26]. Preliminary evaluation of mockups with both older adult and health care pro-viders led to an iterative redesign and higher fidelity interactive visualizations [1], [7]. The visualizations were developed in Tableau, a data analysis tool that supports interactive visualization design [27].…”

“…The components are further broken down into subcomponents, defined as specific measurements such as activities of daily living, processing speed, memory, or social engagement. The principles used to develop the visualizations are described fully in previous work [1]. At a high level the visualizations aim to present wellness information as a holistic integration of different domains of health, allowing older adults to track wellness longitudinally while also diving into specific domains as needed.…”

“…This was informed from prior focus groups where participants indicated that though having different components of health was useful, not all components were equally relevant towards wellness [1]. We abstracted the different components into a single line graph representing overall wellness trend.…”