Hi, everyone.
Thank you for attending this short talk.
I'm Karthik Bhat, a PhD student at Georgia Tech,
and I'm presenting my paper titled, Sociocultural
Dimensions of Tracking Health and Taking
Care, co-authored with my advisor, Dr. Neha Kumar.
Research on personal health informatics in CSCW and HCI
has looked at how people engage in health tracking
and analyzed collected data.
Fit-bits, Apple Watches, and other wearable devices
are becoming more prevalent, which
has made health tracking more convenient and pervasive.
This is being leveraged more and more in chronic disease
management, among other contexts,
because it allows patients to participate more actively
in their care, so they can be more
informed about their health.
But personal health tracking is not always only personal,
and is often shaped by sociocultural and ecological
factors that determine who can track and what they can track,
among other things, which we explore in this study.
We asked the question, what are the sociocultural dimensions
that influence health tracking and patient centered care?
We conducted an interview study with 26
semi-structure interviews.
18 were with individuals who suffered from cardiac diseases.
We asked them about their diagnosis, their interactions
with their doctors, and their at-home care practices,
including health tracking.
The remaining eight interviews were
with cardiac care specialists.
We asked them about their interactions
with their patients and experiences
with digital tracking of health data, both theirs
and their patients.
Our findings fell into four themes,
focusing on the technological, personal, interpersonal,
and ecological factors that shape the adoption of health
tracking behaviors.
First, we laid out the affordances of health tracking
technologies that were appreciated
by our participants, like the irregular heart rhythm
detection on apple watches.
We also laid out reservations they had regarding its usage,
for example, stemming from the lack of customizability
of these features.
Next, we presented their attitudes
towards health information, how they
relied on online information sources,
and how they chose to access this information.
We also found that this information engagement was
staggered over time and among caregivers,
so that the care was continuous and there was less information
overload.
We analyzed the dynamics of patient-doctor interactions
in the context of health tracking,
including how decision making based on health tracking
was outsourced to the doctors.
Finally, we highlighted the cultural situatedness
of health tracking behaviors--
for example, how gender dynamics affected health tracking
and collaborative care-giving.
We also described how family dynamics inform these health
tracking behaviors.
We outlined two main takeaways in our paper.
First, data-driven approaches to health tracking
have mainly foregrounded the individual,
with recent work highlighting other ecological factors.
We show that there is a breadth of sociocultural dimensions
that play an important role and argue that collected data can
lead to better health outcomes when
these are taken into account.
Second, we discuss how our findings
tie into conversations on patient empowerment in HCI
and CSCW.
The focus of prior work has been to uncover
ways in which patients can be more informed, and therefore,
more in control of their health.
We show how health tracking takes place
alongside tensions stemming from sociocultural structures,
and more information is not always more empowering.
Please consider reading our paper
where we present these findings and arguments
in much more detail.
I would love to hear your thoughts and questions, now
or by email, or over a coffee in person at some point later.
Thank you.