Interactions - January/February 2019

@INTERACTIONSMAG 72 INTERACTIONS JANUARY–FEBRUARY2019
This forum is dedicated to personal health in all its many facets: decision making, goal setting, celebration, discovery,
reflection, and coordination, among others. We look at innovations in interactive technologies and how they help address
current critical healthcare challenges. — Yunan Chen, Editor
FORUM HEALTH MATTERS

roles of the professionals managing the therapies);

• technologies to support health
behavior change (e.g., apps and
wearables that support goal setting,
behavior tracking, and information
interpretation); and
• technologies for communication
and collaboration (e.g., finding and
learning with “people like me,”
telemedicine, citizen science).

In other words, the transformational tools for 21st- century healthcare are digital, and most of them are interactive. This creates challenges for HCI in terms of understanding people’s behaviors around these tools and designing tools that are fit for purpose, engaging, and safe. Despite these challenges, HCI, and the value of person-centered and context-sensitive design, are often invisible to health researchers, who focus on clinicians’ expertise in defining requirements for and evaluating interventions (see for example [ 2], where HCI is notable only by its absence from the discussion). A limited understanding and awareness of HCI poses challenges, which have been summarized by various authors [ 3]. Here we focus on digital interventions and develop two themes: the end goals of research and how the methods of different disciplines can complement each other.

THE GOALS OF RESEARCH

The primary question for health
research around any intervention,
digital or otherwise, is: Does it
improve outcomes? This encompasses
questions about safety ( What are the
HCI researchers and practitioners
have a key role in ensuring that
healthcare systems are fit for purpose
(safe, effective, engaging, etc.) and
in discovering new interactions
that can enhance health and well-
being. However, working with
health professionals and biomedical
researchers can pose challenges—
some obvious, some subtle.

Every discipline evolves from
earlier work and community
consensus on its appropriate goals,
values, and methods. Jonathan Grudin
[ 1] traces the roots of HCI to sources
including ergonomics and information
processing. HCI has readily adopted
and adapted methods from many
disciplines (psychology, computer
science, design, social sciences,
etc.), with goals such as developing
theories of how people interact with
technologies and creating novel
interaction paradigms that transform
people’s experiences. Arguably,
HCI is not a discipline but rather a
community with a common interest
in people’s interactions with digital
technologies, recognizing that each
person is an individual. In contrast,
health research spans many scales
of interest, from biological sciences
that investigate the causes of disease
to implementation sciences that
investigate how to deploy health
interventions at scale, but it has
developed a narrower repertoire of
methods, of which the gold standard
is the randomized controlled trial
(RCT). More general clinical trials,
working to slightly looser constraints,
are the common approach to
evaluating digital health technologies.
Much health research focuses on
populations rather than individuals,
and evaluations of digital health
interventions have—at least until very
recently—been based on an implicit
assumption that an intervention will
work equally well for everyone as long
as they engage with it as intended.
Whereas the significant advances
in healthcare in the 20th century
were delivered through advances in
our understanding of disease and
pharmaceuticals, those of the early
21st century are being enabled by
technological developments, such as:
• discoveries from big data (which
rely on advances in data gathering,
data linkage, algorithms, imaging,
and interaction design to support
sensemaking);