Healthcare Environments
Biomedical Informatics
Clinical Infomatics
Nursing Infomatics
Nutrition
Infomatics
Medical Imaging
Informatics
Laboratory Environments
Bioinformatics
production of complex technologies, and
how patterns of appropriation shape system use. Grinter received her Ph.D. in information and computer science from the
University of California, Irvine. Prior to joining the Georgia Institute of Technology, she
worked in the computer science division of
Bell Laboratories and in Xerox PARC’s
Computer Science Laboratory.
Consumer Health
Informatics
Translational
Informatics
Public Health
Informatics
Wellness Informatics
Nutrition Environment
Physical Activity
Mental Health
Everyday Environments
people avoid needing the formal
health-care system through
wellness applications, then
how can we let people redefine
health to meet their own needs
(e.g., walking up the stairs more
easily) that have not been clinically proven to improve health?
We must evaluate if redefining
health truly helps the individual.
We offer wellness informatics
as a starting point for defining
a set of common characteristics
that can frame the fundamental contributions that we have
collectively made in this space.
We also believe it may help in
defining the challenges that
still remain. For example, what
is the full range of social and
cultural values that influence
wellness practices and consequently need to be accounted
for in the design of health ICTs?
How do we evaluate wellness
informatics solutions, including addressing how frequently
they have to be used in order
to make an impact? We are
not suggesting that people are
not currently working on these
questions; rather, we want to
argue that wellness informatics
could be used to draw together
the many distinct projects that
now compose the space. In
conclusion, our goal in writing
this article was to begin the all-important process of engaging
in dialogue with our colleagues
working on health-related,
human-centered computing
research. We offer this as a
starting point for what we hope
will be a series of conversations
that collectively define wellness
informatics. We look forward to
hearing from you; to encourage
conversation, we have created a
Facebook group called “Wellness
Informatics.”
Katie A. Siek is an assistant
professor in computer sci-
ence at the University of
Colorado at Boulder, where
she leads the Wellness
Innovation and Interaction
Andrea E. Grimes is a
human-centered comput-
ing Ph.D. candidate at
Georgia Tech. Her research
lies within the fields of
human-computer interac-
tion and computer-supported cooperative
work (CSCW). In particular, she studies
how technology can be designed to fit with-
in specific socio-cultural contexts. Much of
her work has focused on designing tech-
nology to address diet-related health dis-
parities in the African-American population.
This research has involved designing and
evaluating a nutrition-oriented mobile game
and a community-based information-shar-
ing application. Her other research includes
examining the future of human-food inter-
action research in HCI and designing tech-
nologies to support family health. Grimes
received a B.S. in computer science from
Northeastern University. She is a Microsoft
Research Fellow and was an NSF Graduate
Research Fellow, a Google Anita Borg
Scholar, and she received a Yahoo! Key
Technical Challenge Grant to support her
dissertation research.
[ 8] Grimes, A., Tan,
D. and Morris, D.
“Toward Technologies
that Support Family
Reflections on Health.”
In Proc. ACM 2009
International Conference
on Supporting Group
Work (GROUP ‘09), ACM
Press (2009): 311–320.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Rebecca E. Grinter is an
associate professor in the
School of Interactive
Computing at Georgia
January + February 2010
DOI: 10.1145/1649475.1649494
© 2010 ACM 1072-5220/10/0100 $10.00