Self-Care Technologies in HCI

Abstract

Many studies show that self-care technologies can support patients with chronic conditions and their carers in understanding the ill body and increasing control of their condition. However, many of these studies have largely privileged a medical perspective and thus overlooked how patients and carers integrate selfcare into their daily lives and mediate their conditions through technology. In this review, we focus on how patients and carers use and experience self-care technology through a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lens. We analyse studies of self-care published in key HCI journals and conferences using the Grounded Theory Literature Review (GTLR) method and identify research trends and design tensions. We then draw out opportunities for advancing HCI research in self-care, namely, focusing further on patients' everyday life experience, considering existing collaborations in self-care, and increasing the influence on medical research and practice around self-care technology. CCS Concepts: r Applied computing → Consumer health; r Human-centered computing → Interaction design process and methods; HCI theory, concepts and models;

Flexible and Mindful Self-Tracking

“…Analysing posts of paper bullet journals on Instagram, this study focuses on examining what bullet journalists track in their paper notebooks and how they design them. Our findings inform research on self-tracking in personal informatics [2,35] and self-monitoring with self-care technologies [48], and provide two contributions.…”

“…Journaling practices have been investigated in many fields such as personal information management [31,60], life logging [56], chronic illness management [48,64], personal informatics [20,35], and applied research methods [8,21].…”

“…Self-monitoring personal health and wellbeing is a central part of self-managing chronic conditions [6,48]. Research in HCI has focused on the understanding of selfmanagement practices and the use of self-care technologies [48].…”

“…Research in HCI has focused on the understanding of selfmanagement practices and the use of self-care technologies [48]. In contrast to personal informatics systems, self-care technologies are specifically designed for people with chronic conditions and typically support individuals in monitoring and managing primary disease indicators with or without the involvement of caregivers and clinicians.…”

“…Prior research has explored self-monitoring of: blood glucose levels in diabetes [46,49]; blood pressure by people with hypertension [37]; mood in those affected by bipolar disorder [4]; and migraine triggers [50]. These studies show that self-monitoring tools can aid individuals in engaging in reflective thinking, developing causal relationships between disease indicators and health behaviour, and adjusting to their respective conditions in everyday life [48].…”