A particular strand within the FutureCOMM research project gave rise to the TiY approach. It explores the role of design and technology in the growing area of chronic-disease self-care, with a particular focus on type 1 diabetes and an emphasis on the patients active participation in their own care. A design approach enabling patient's active engagement and appropriation of self-care technology is taken by rethinking the hubris of techno-centric and predictive approaches and enabling a patient-centric technology that affords the personalization of self-monitoring practices to support better reflections, the exploration of possibilities, and the generation of better questions to improve health outcomes.
Empirical work – semi-structured interviews with individuals with diabetes and ethnographic observations of support-group - has been undertaken to expose to analysis the logics and strategies that underline diabetes patients self-care practices and their use of self-care technologies. One aspect that immediately grabs attention when interacting with affected people is that diabetes is so ubiquitous and ever-present that it takes the form of a life-style. Its effects are so tightly entangled with everyday practices that it is practically impossible to separate them from any other daily activities and thoughts. Furthermore, it has become clear that diabetes not only manifests differently in different subjects, but also impacts peoples life very differently. The very same activity affects different patients in different, sometimes even radically opposed, ways.
This varying impact of diabetes suggests that it would be wrong to prefigure what should be monitored and what should no, while the ubiquitousness of the condition shows how it would be wrong to build technological supports that reduce diabetes to a mere medical condition (mass of symptoms or physiological values).
Within this context, TiY is an open-ended journaling platform that supports patient empowerment and that has been designed in a participatory fashion with reference to user-centred-design methods. Two series of design iterations and evaluation tests have been completed to date. This has both yielded valuable insights about specific practices and highlighted for improvement many usability and functional issues. Source code is available here.
Early brainstorming
Design workshop with users
Discussion of Design Scenario and early TiY's storyboard
Usability tests for inputing glucose readings
Design games and further exploration of problems and future scenarios
Early prototype used as technological probes for
User Centered Design test (feedback diary included)
Early Sketches for data visualization and interaction features
Refined prototypes tested with users
