Andrea Grimes

Celebratory technology: new directions for food research in HCI

Food is a central part of our lives. Fundamentally, we need food to survive. Socially, food is something that brings people together-individuals interact through and around it. Culturally, food practices reflect our ethnicities and nationalities. Given the importance of food in our daily lives, it is important to understand what role technology currently plays and the roles it can be imagined to play in the future. In this paper we describe the existing and potential design space for HCI in the area of human-food interaction. We present ideas for future work on designing technologies in the area of human-food interaction that celebrate the positive interactions that people have with food as they eat and prepare foods in their everyday lives.

EatWell: sharing nutrition-related memories in a low-income community

Low-income African American communities face a disproportionate amount of diet-related health problems in the United States. To address this issue, we developed EatWell, a system that allows people to use their cell phones to create voice memories describing how they have tried to eat healthfully in their neighborhoods (e.g., at local restaurants) and listen to the memories that others have created. In this paper, we describe the results of our field trial of EatWell, specifically characterizing how our participants were able to craft stories that were both emotive and culturally-relevant, the challenges that arose in creating these memories and finally how sharing these stories facilitated a sense of community empowerment. We conclude by presenting implications for the design of future applications that facilitate the sharing of health-related experiences.

Let's play!: mobile health games for adults

Researchers have designed a variety of systems that promote wellness. However, little work has been done to examine how casual mobile games can help adults learn how to live healthfully. To explore this design space, we created OrderUP!, a game in which players learn how to make healthier meal choices. Through our field study, we found that playing OrderUP! helped participants engage in four processes of change identified by a well-established health behavior theory, the Transtheoretical Model: they improved their understanding of how to eat healthfully and engaged in nutrition-related analytical thinking, reevaluated the healthiness of their real life habits, formed helping relationships by discussing nutrition with others and started replacing unhealthy meals with more nutritious foods. Our research shows the promise of using casual mobile games to encourage adults to live healthier lifestyles.

Toward technologies that support family reflections on health

Previous research has explored how technology can motivate healthy living in social groups such as friends and coworkers. However, little research has focused on the implications of collecting, sharing, and reflecting upon health information within families. To explore this domain, we conducted a study that consisted of a week-long journaling activity followed by semi-structured interviews and formative design activities with 15 families (66 people). We identified four areas in which these practices are unique in a family context. Based on these findings we propose preliminary considerations for technologies that effectively support family reflections on health data.

Reflecting on health: a system for students to monitor diet and exercise

Using an iterative design process, we designed and evaluated a system for college students to encourage the development and maintenance of healthy diet and exercise habits. The system has three components: a camera phone application to support photographic diet and exercise journaling, an automatic workout tracking application for exercise machines in the gym, and a visualization application to support users as they reflect on their diet and exercise activities.

Designing persuasion: health technology for low-income African American communities

In the United States, African Americans face a disproportionate amount of diet-related health problems. For example, African American adults are 1.6 times more likely to have diabetes than their Caucasian counterparts. Individuals in low-income communities may face a greater risk because they typically have less access to healthy foods. Due to the significant diet-related problems within the African American community, public health researchers call for approaches to health promotion that take into account the relationship between culture and dietary habits. In this paper, we discuss three important considerations for the design of technologies that address the diet-related health disparities in low-income African American communities. These considerations include designing for cultural relevancy, modeling health behavior, and encouraging healthy behavior through the use of social psychological theories of persuasion. We use a game design example to illustrate how each of these considerations can be incorporated into the development of new technology.

Characteristics of shared health reflections in a local community

We performed a content analysis of the information shared in a locally and culturally focused health application, EatWell. In EatWell, information is shared via the creation of audio recordings. Our results highlight the reflective nature of these recordings, in particular, 1) the topics discussed in these reflections as well as their tone, 2) how these reflections were contextualized (locally and culturally) and 3) how system users addressed one another in their reflections. We compare our findings with the dominant technological approach to supporting health information exchange amongst lay people: online support groups. In particular, we reflect upon why, though many of the community-building features of online support groups did not translate into EatWell, our users felt a sense of community empowerment. Based on our results, we discuss implications for designing locally and culturally focused health applications that leverage reflection as a contribution method.

Life scheduling to support multiple social roles

We present the results of our study of 15 working parents, and how they manage their life scheduling needs, that is, how they manage their personal and professional schedules across settings and calendaring tools. In particular, we discuss how their dual roles of parent and employee compel them to record personal information on their professional calendars and we detail the tensions that arise in doing so. Finally, we present suggestions for future calendaring applications that better support working parents in managing their life scheduling needs.

Wellness informatics: towards a definition and grand challenges

The last decade has seen a large explosion of health-related human centered computing research and practice focused on wellness (e.g., good nutrition and exercise promotion) with the intention of helping people avoid needing medical care. And while Health Informatics may appear to be the obvious home for these activities, it is a discipline that has focused on the design, development, and evaluation of systems to process healthcare data and through that aid in patient treatment. Given the ubiquity of wellness systems we think its time to create a Wellness Informatics community. The goal of the workshop is to identify the themes and grand challenges for designing and evaluating Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) that help people stay well.

FEATURE Is wellness informatics a field of human-centered health informatics?

(e.g., the appropriate amount of exercise). Wellness informatics applications also frequently have to collect other behavioral measures of health outcomes (e.g., how long an individual stays engaged with a particular practice). Other sources of data inputs to the system stem from the socioeconomic and cultural nature of wellness (e.g., what traditions influence cooking practices). These sources have a greater degree of heterogeneity than some fields in health informatics, whose data sources come from health care and medical sources. Example: During a design workshop with low-income caregivers, we met single moms Maria and Sophia, who each have three children and work long hours at multiple jobs. They told us about their typical hectic day. After 12 hours on her feet working at McDonald’s, Maria picks up dinner at Burger King and heads home. She cannot eat fast food anymore because of a health issue. The past decade has seen an explosion of health-related, human-centered computing research and practice focused on wellness (e.g., good nutrition and exercise promotion) to help people avoid the need for medical care. And while health informatics may appear to be the obvious home for these activities, it is a discipline that has focused on the design and evaluation of systems to process health care data and, through that, aid in patient treatment. Given the ubiquity of wellness systems, we think it’s time to create a wellness informatics community of researchers and practitioners, and through this define opportunities and challenges in the design and evaluation of information and communications technologies (ICTs) that help people stay well. Wellness informatics is a human-centered computing science focused on the design, deployment, and evaluation of human-facing technological solutions to promote and manage wellness acts such as the prevention of disease and the management of health [1]. It is human-centered because it requires that technologies are married with innovations in how the ICT communicates with the user, in ways that are psychologically, sociologically, culturally, and societally relevant— without which wellness will not be promoted and sustained. It is also a computing science because it requires hardware and software innovations to make devices that people can use anywhere and everywhere wellness occurs. We offer some themes that we think characterize wellness informatics: Data sources are numerous. In wellness, the individual manages their health information, and consequently relies on multiple data streams that come from numerous sources [2]. Wellness informatics applications may collect data from the patient themselves (e.g., exercise completed), or incorporate data from the medical and health communities about what [1] By human facing we mean technologies that people are using i.e., adopting, accepting, and appropriating it into their lives; people are empowered through their usage; and it’s readily accessible technology.