Symptom and behavior recognition - and associated health outcomes - have enormous clinical significance for pediatric patients undergoing long-term treatment regimens such as chemotherapy. Parent proxy-reported health outcomes, while still common, could be prone to bias due to their limited means to understand and assess the patient's subjective experience (e.g., mood, pain, etc.). This project aims to explore the design of mobile health technologies to accommodate both the patient- and caregiver-reported observations as promising means to promote patient participation in care and collect experiential and observational data about the patient's health status.
CO-OP is an interactive mobile health (mHealth) system that utilizes visual illustrations of everyday illness experiences to investigate how technology can support chronically ill patients and family caregivers' collaborative effort to track and co-create personally meaningful representations of everyday illnesss experiences in non-clinical settings. The system will elicit and probe patients' and family caregivers' observations of treatment-induced illness experiences in relation to their everyday activities, and their design input--through a suit of media technology (e.g., photo, video, audio, digital canvas, etc.) readily available on their mobile device. These data, collaboratively collected by patients and parents, are expected to provide scaffolds for patients to engage with their everyday lived experience and better articulate their illness experiences for the care provider by creating personally meaningful representations.
The Health Experience and Applications (Hx) Lab investigates how interactive technologies can be designed and developed to facilitate personal health-related information awareness and understanding. We study, design and prototype computing tools for digital capture and communication of personal health status and progress, drawing from the perspectives of clinical caregivers, families, and individuals.
