Beyond the numbers - a user-centered design approach for personal reflective healthcare technologies

This thesis is framed in the context of the healthcare’s paradigm shift that considers the patients’ home as the primary self-care environment. The consequence is straightforward: health practices are shifting from being solely delivered by professionals and in medical oriented context (e.g. hospitals) to become a shared responsibility of professionals and patients in the complexity of a home environment. Healthcare technologies are becoming widespread in the commercial market fading away the line that separates lifestyle and healthcare. A not-thatvisible consequence of the information that these technologies offer is that patients can become proactive managers of their own health. The increasing access to new developments in personal systems with in-built sensor technology such as smartphones and wrist devices is opening an opportunity for the healthcare community to address care outside the hospital context. The main contribution of this thesis is the identification of a contrast between assistive and supportive homecare technologies, proposing that supportive home healthcare technologies can be better integrated into people’s daily life as they empower users to play an active role in contributing, reflecting and learning from the big amount of data collected by these technological systems. Persuasive technology could be strengthen by extending its capabilities of collecting and assessing physical activity to provide mechanisms for reflection, providing feedback that users can contribute to. The approach assumed in this thesis differs from previous attempts to reach the patient in that it assumes the challenges of considering users’ personal experiences and social context, collected in-situ, as crucial aspects when providing care support, which makes the research process more representative on real users’ daily life needs and desires.