Designing for Healthy Lifestyles: Design Considerations for Mobile Technologies to Encourage Consumer Health and Wellness
Venue
Foundations and Trends® in Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 6 (2014), 167–315
Publication Year
2014
Authors
Sunny Consolvo, Predrag Klasnja, David W. McDonald, James A. Landay
BibTeX
Abstract
As the rates of lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease
continue to rise, the development of effective tools that can help people adopt and
sustain healthier habits is becoming ever more important. Mobile computing holds
great promise for providing effective support for helping people manage their health
in everyday life. Yet, for this promise to be realized, mobile wellness systems
need to be well designed, not only in terms of how they implement specific
behavior-change techniques but also, among other factors, in terms of how much
burden they put on the user, how well they integrate into the user’s daily life,
and how they address the user’s privacy concerns. Designing for all of these
constraints is difficult, and it is often not clear what tradeoffs particular design
decisions have on how a wellness application is experienced and used. In this
monograph, we provide an account of different design approaches to common features
of mobile wellness applications and we discuss the tradeoffs inherent in those
approaches. We also outline the key challenges that HCI researchers and designers
will need to address to move the state of the art for mobile wellness technologies
forward.
