Interactions - January/February 2010

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.