The practice of health self-management offers behavioral and problem-solving strategies that can effectively promote responsibility for one's own wellbeing, improve one's health outcomes, and decrease the cost of health services. Personal informatics applications support health self-management by allowing their users to easily track personal health information, and to review the changes and patterns in this information. Over the course of the past several years, I have pursued a research agenda centered on understanding how personal health informatics applications can further support the strategies of health self-management--specifically those relating to goal-management and behavior change. I began by developing a flexible personal informatics tool, called Salud!, that I could use to observe real-world goal management and behavior change strategies, as well as use to evaluate new interfaces designed to assist in goal management. Unlike existing personal informatics tools, Salud! allows users to self-define the information that they will track, which allows tracking of highly personal and meaningful data that may not be possible to track given other tools. It also enables users to share their account data with facilitators (e.g. fitness grainers, nutritionists, etc.) who can provide input and feedback. Salud! was built on top of an infrastructure consisting of a stack of modular services that make it easier for others to develop and/or evaluate a variety of personal informatics applications. Several research teams used this infrastructure to develop and deploy a variety of custom projects. Informal analysis of their efforts showed an unmet need for data storage and visualization services for home- and health-based sensor data. In order to design a goal management support tool for Salud!, I first, I conducted a meta-analysis of relevant research literature to cull a set of proven goal management strategies. The key outcome of this work was an operationalization of Action Plans--goal management strategies that are effective at supporting behavior change. I then deployed Salud! in two fitness-related contexts to observe and understand the breadth of health-related behavior change and goal management practices. Findings from these deployments showed that personal informatics tools are most helpful to individuals who are able to articulate short-term, actionable goals, and who are able to integrate self-tracking into their daily activities. The literature meta-analysis and the two Salud! deployments provided formative requirements for a goal management interaction that would both incorporate effective goal management strategies and support the breadth of real-world goals. I developed a model of the goal management process as the framework for such an interaction. This model enables goals to be represented, evaluated, and visualized, based on a wide range of user objectives and data collection strategies. Using this model, I was able to develop a set of interactions that allow users of Salud! to manage their personal goals within the application. The generalized goal management model shows the inherent difficulty in supporting open-ended, highly personalized goal management. To function generically, Salud! requires facilitator input to correctly process goals and meaningfully classify their attributes. However, for specific goals represented by specific data collection strategies, it is possible to fully- or semi-automate the goal management process. I ran a large-scale evaluation of Salud! with the goal management interaction to evaluate the effectiveness of a fully-automated goal management interaction. The evaluation consisted of a common health self-management intervention: a simple fitness program to increase participants' daily step count. The results of this evaluation suggest that the goal management interaction may improve the rate of goal realization among users who are initially less active and less confident in their ability to succeed. Additionally, this evaluation showed that, while it can significantly increase participants' step count, a fully automated fitness program is not as effective as traditional, instructor-led fitness programs. However, it is much easier to administer and much less resource intensive, showing that it can be utilized to rapidly evaluate concrete goal management strategies.

In many small to mid-size nonprofits, a large amount of knowledge and information is confined to local folders, hard copy formats or even specific people, making it inaccessible to those who could benefit from it. This informal practice causes duplication of efforts and prevents the organization from maintaining critical knowledge and learning from past experience. Partnering with The Center for Victims of Violence and Crime (CVVC), a Pittsburgh-based human services nonprofit organization, I applied human-centered design methods to identify their specific informal knowledge and information processes and structures. Using the research findings, I developed a sustainable and systematic knowledge management practice that also takes into account the constraints of funding and time, which many nonprofits face. To support this practice, I created a system with a hierarchical information architecture that is able to expand overtime to accommodate the growth of the organization and its programs. It enables clear organization, storage and retrieval of explicit knowledge documents as well as the related tacit knowledge, creating the necessary basis for sharing and collaboration. By simplifying and formalizing major administrative tasks, the system also streamlines organizational processes, allowing the staff to work more effectively. Implemented with Microsoft SharePoint 2010, the system creates a trustworthy environment that is necessary to facilitate organizational learning and maintain critical knowledge, leading to sustainability and innovation.

In order to support people's everyday health and wellness goals, health practitioners and organizations are embracing a more holistic approach to medicine---supporting patients both as individuals and members of their families and communities, and meeting people where they are: at home, work, and school. This 'everyday' approach to health has been enabled by new technologies, both dedicated-devices and services designed specifically for health sensing and feedback -- and multipurpose --such as smartphones and broadband-connected computers. Our physical relationship with computing has also become more intimate, and personal health devices can now track and report an unprecedented amount of information about our bodies, following their users around to an extent no doctor, coach or dietitian ever could. But we still have much to learn about how pervasive health devices can actually help promote the adoption of new health practices in daily life. Once they're `in the wild,' such devices interact with their users, but also the physical, social and political worlds in which those users live. These external factors---such as the walkablity of a person's neighborhood or the social acceptability of exercise and fitness activities---play a significant role in people's ability to change their health behaviors and sustain that change. Specifically, social theories of behavior change suggest that peer support may be critical in changing health attitudes and behaviors. These theories---Social Support Theory, Social Cognitive Theory and Social Comparison Theory among them---offer both larger frameworks for understanding the social influences of health behavior change and specific mechanisms by which that behavior change could be supported through interpersonal interaction. However, we are only beginning to understand the role that pervasive health technologies can play in supporting and mediating social interaction to motivate people's exploration and adoption of healthy behaviors. In this dissertation I seek to better understand how social computing technologies can help people help each other live healthier lives. I ground my research in a participant-led investigation of a specific population and condition: adolescents and obesity prevention. I want to understand how social behavior change theories from psychology and sociology apply to pervasive social health technology. Which mechanisms work and why? How does introducing a pervasive social health system into a community affect individuals' behaviors and attitudes towards their health? Finally, I want to contribute back to those theories, testing their effectiveness in novel technologically mediated situations. Adolescent obesity is a particularly salient domain in which to study these issues. In the last 30 years, adolescent obesity rates in the US alone have tripled, and although they have leveled off in recent years they remain elevated compared to historical norms. Habits formed during adolescence can have lifelong effects, and health promotion research shows that even the simple act of walking more each day has lasting benefits. Everyday health and fitness research in HCI has generally focused on social comparison and "gamified" competition. This is especially true in studies focused on adolescents and teens. However, both theory from social psychology and evidence from the health promotion community suggest that these direct egocentric models of behavior change may be limited in scope: they may only work for certain kinds of people, and their effects may be short-lived once the competitive framework is removed. I see an opportunity for a different approach: social tools for everyday adolescent health. These systems, embedded in existing school and community practices, can leverage scalable, non-competitive social interaction to catalyze positive perceptions of physical activity and social support for fitness, while remaining grounded in the local environment. Over the last several years I have completed a series of field engagements with middle school students in the Atlanta area. I have focused on students in a majority-minority low-income community in the Atlanta metropolitan area facing above-average adult obesity levels, and I have involved the students as informants throughout the design process. In this dissertation, I report findings based on a series of participatory design-based formative explorations; the iterative design of a pedometer-based pervasive health system to test these theories in practice; and the deployment of this system---StepStream---in three configurations: a prototype deployment, a `self-tracking' deployment, and a `social' deployment. In this dissertation, I test the following thesis: A school-based social fitness approach to everyday adolescent health can positively influence offline health behaviors in real-world settings. Furthermore, a noncompetitive social fitness system can perform comparably in attitude and behavior change to more competitive or direct-comparison systems, especially for those most in need of behavior change}. I make the following contributions: (1) The identification of tensions and priorities for the design of everyday health systems for adolescents; (2) A design overview of StepStream, a social tool for everyday adolescent health; (3) A description of StepStream's deployment from a socio-technical perspective, describing the intervention as a school-based pervasive computing system; (4) An empirical study of a noncompetitive awareness system for physical activity; (5) A comparison of this system in two configurations in two different middle schools; (6) An analysis of observational learning and collective efficacy in a pervasive health system.

A bachelor thesis conducted over the spring term of 2018, the final exam of the Innovation and Design Engineering program at Karlstad University. The contractor of this thesis project was Parfum Lombard AB in Svedala, Sweden, a market leading within the hairdressing equipment industry in Sweden. They provide a high level of innovation and product development to improve its assortment.   The project of this thesis will focus on the frequent used shampoo units at the hair salons in particular. The shampoo units will be analyzed from an ergonomic point of view, because the current sitting position can cause discomfort and pain for customers with neck problems. Today, neck and back pain are amongst the most common chronic pains issues, which requires further development of this type of equipment in order to make it more suited for the end-user. The chosen target group for the project are people with neck-related disabilities as the starting point for formulating the design problem and developing the solution.   The main objective of the project is to develop a concept that offers the customer a more ergonomic position, while washing the hair at the salon. By following a user-centered product development process, the problem will be addressed in the following parts: Pre-study, product specification, idea generation, concept development and finally construction in the layout design phase. The product specification forms a key part, which as a dynamic document links together both customers, clients and professionals perspective of the issue, and underlines the final concept selection.   Key findings: To improve the current washing position the sharp angle between the upper body and the head needs to be reduced. That could be solved in two ways; The backboard of the upper body leans back even further to accomplish a more recumbent position or by an additional support to the neck in order to gain a more up-right position. The last mentioned, which also represent the final concept ensures that not only the neck is supported but also the head. This means that the heavy load that the head’s own weight previously caused has now been drastically reduced.   The presented concept in the report differs from the similar existing product by its support surface. It provides a wider support area to the customer’s neck and head. With a slim design that only depends on a few centimeters of the basin´s geometry, the chances of matching as many models of shampoo units as possible increases. The developed concept are presented in both CAD- and mock-up models.

abstract: Overview: Transition from the pediatric to adult care setting for 'emerging adults' (ages 18- 26) continues to develop as a growing concern in health care. The Adolescent Transition Program teaches chronically ill 'emerging adults' disease self-management skills while promoting a healthy lifestyle. Transferring this knowledge is vital for successful health care outcomes. Unfortunately, patients who have been transferred to the adult care setting, report that they felt lost in the system due to lack of communication between care teams, inadequate support systems, and insufficient disease management knowledge. To address these gaps, the design of the physical environment must adapt to these challenges while also meeting the needs of various chronic illnesses. Methodology: Design thinking or human-centered design was utilized as the vehicle to discover unmet 'emerging adult' and adolescent health clinician needs. Ethnographic research methods involved observations at adolescent health clinics and in learning environments outside of the healthcare setting as well as interviews with 5 outpatient adolescent clinicians. A survey was also conducted with 16 'emerging adults' to understand how they learn. Lastly, a literature review explored the history of the adolescent, adolescent development, adolescence and chronic illness, and The Adolescent Transition Program. Results: Findings revealed that physical environment must be conducive to meet a variety of clinical and education activities such as chronic disease management, support adolescent development, and should be more human-centered. The space should transform to the patient education or clinical activity rather than the activity transforming to the space. Five design recommendations were suggested to ensure that the outpatient clinic supported both clinician and 'emerging adults' needs. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S.D. Design 2014

Precision Medicine: the future of data-driven healthcare is an interaction design master’s thesis project aimed at presenting a vision of how genomic and quantified data might be integrated into the Swedish public healthcare system. This thesis focuses on a user-centered design process, examining patient health needs and desires. It also looks at the rise of genomic data and precision medicine. Ethnographic research has been conducted with people in the different Scandinavian countries, hearing their health stories first hand, both in relation to genomic data, quantified self data and overall health. Commonly used service design methods such as customer journey mappings, blueprinting and business model mapping have played a large role in shaping the experience of the concept

The aim of this thesis is to identify innovation opportunities, which will serve to encourage individuals with inborn metabolic disorder phenylketunuria (also PKU) to comply with their strict dietary restrictions. The theoretical part of the thesis is devoted to the definition of basic concepts of innovation and techniques of Design thinking focusing on the Human-centered design approach. Futhermore the reader will find introduction into inborn metabolic disorder phenylketonuria. The practical part contains a plan of research, description of the current situation on the Czech market, outputs of research with experts, outputs of the workshop with individuals with PKU and the identification of innovation opportunities and recommendations.

Studies assessing novice programming proficiency have often found that many students coming out of introductory-level programming courses still struggle with programming. To address this, some researchers have attempted to find and develop ways to better help students succeed in learning to program. This dissertation research contributes to this area by studying the programming processes of students trained through a specific program design curriculum, How to Design Programs (HTDP). HTDP is an introductory-level curriculum for teaching program design that teaches a unique systematic process called the design recipe that leverages the structure of input data to design programs. The design recipe explicitly scaffolds learners through the program design process by asking students to produce intermediate artifacts that represent a given problem in different ways up to a program solution to the problem. Although HTDP is used in several higher-education institutions and some K-12 programs, how HTDP-trained students design programs towards problems, particularly ones with multiple task-components, has not been thoroughly studied. The overarching goal of this dissertation is to gain an understanding and insight into how students use the techniques put forth by the design recipe towards designing solutions for programming problems. I conducted a series of exploratory user studies with HTDP-trained student cohorts from HTDP course instances across two different universities to collect and analyze students’ programming process data in situ. I synthesized findings from each study towards an overall conceptual framework, which serves as a data-grounded theory that captures several facets of HTDP-trained students’ program design process. The main contribution of this work is this theory, which describes: (1) the program design-related skills that students used and the levels of complexity at which they applied these skills, (2) how students’ use of design skills evolve during a course, (3) the interactions between program design skills and course contexts that influenced how students applied their skills, and (4) the programming process patterns by which students approached the programming problems we gave and how these approaches relate towards students’ success with the problems. Using insights from the theory, I describe recommendations toward pedagogical practices for teaching HTDP-based courses, as well as broader reflections towards teaching introductory CS.

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