Constructing identities through storytelling in diabetes management

Abstract

The continuing epidemics of diabetes and obesity create much need for information technologies that can help individuals engage in proactive health management. Yet many of these technologies focus on such pragmatic issues as collecting and presenting health information and modifying individuals' behavior. At the same time, researchers in clinical community argue that individuals' perception of their identity has dramatic consequences for their health behaviors. In this paper we discuss results of a deployment study of a mobile health monitoring application. We show how individuals with considerable diabetes experience found a unique way to adopt this health-monitoring application to construct and negotiate their identities as persons with a chronic disease. We argue that viewing health management from identity construction perspective opens new opportunities for research and design in technologies for health.

Assessing a Collaborative Application for Comic Strips Composition

“…Several attempts have been made in designing technological devices to assist the narrative process. Social networking infrastructures such as Facebook [2], or ad-hoc mobile applications such as MAHI [5], have been used to support digital storytelling in remote, showing how teenagers represent themselves and negotiate their identities online. Some studies in HCI and Education have investigated how teenagers express their narrative ideas in the realization of digital contents, such as videogames, describing the educational benefits of digital storytelling through creative activities [6].…”

“…In the process of narrating a story, authors express their identities and make narrative decisions, characterizing the possible world they create [6]. This aspect becomes particularly important when the narrators are teenagers, as they are in the process of developing their own identity [5].…”

Helping Me Helping You: Designing to Influence Health Behaviour through Social Connections

“…Chick-Clique [37] showed an increased step count for one group, but not the other, due to confounding reasons. Finally, the MAHI system allowed for social support for newly diagnosed diabetics [27], and a means to construct one's identity for those that have been living with diabetes for more than one year [26]. The variable results can be better understood with the use of theoretical models in the design and evaluation of these systems, which can provide insight into how these systems were successful in achieving health behaviour change and how they can be improved.…”

HCI and mobile health interventions

“…This approach can answer important questions on why technologies work in a given environment for a given set of users or why they fail to engage a target audience. In short, humancomputer interaction research can offer complementary insights into how people integrate smartphones, sensor networks, and social networks into their health behavior change efforts, as well as insight into how to design behavior change technologies such that they are more effective.Within HCI, there has been a recent movement to study the roles in which sensors, social networks, smartphones, and other technologies can take in behavior change related to water intake [3,4], diet [5][6][7][8][9][10][11], physical activity [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22], healthy sleep behaviors [23,24], and chronic disease management [25][26][27][28][29][30]. Yet, there is a little overlap between HCI and the health sciences in these endeavors.…”