Empathy in Health Technologies

Many projects in HCI focus on health care and data collection, including those that help might diagnose or identify different disorders or communicate health information. One danger of this is the potential for these technologies to cause unnecessary fear and anxiety in its users over their health or the health of their loved ones. We are exploring ways that technology can be designed to be more empathic and sensitive to the prospect of delivering potentially negative health care information, and in particular, technology that may potentially identify bad news of a diagnosis. This work was presented at Design & Emotion 2010.

Example messaging for sharing a test result Example messaging for seeing an abnormally high reading on a blood glucose meter

People

Eun Kyoung Choe
Marisa Duarte
Wanda Pratt
Julie Kientz

Publication

  • Choe, E. K., Duarte, M. E., & Kientz, J. A. (2010). Understanding and Designing Computing Technologies that Convey Concerning Health News. In 7th International Conference on Design and Emotion 2010.