Ten years after the formalization of Personal Informatics brought us new frontiers to advance this field. In this talk, I will present my six-year research on designing and evaluating personal health informatics in low-socioeconomic status contexts. More specifically, how families with low-socioeconomic status use their fitness tracking data, given the structural barriers they face in living a healthy life. Through in-depth qualitative fieldwork, I identified five key characteristics and one key process of interpersonal informatics — personal informatics tools that catalyze social interactions necessary for managing health behavior. Grounded in Social-Cognitive Theory, this conceptual framework can advance our understanding of how to design effective digital health tools and enhance health equity.
I am a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Research in Computation and Society (CRCS). My research is in the fields of HCI, CSCW, and Digital Health Equity. My research aim is to investigate how technologies can help communities advance their health and wellbeing, towards achieving health equity. Through my work, I demonstrated how storytelling, gamification, visualization, and data reflection can support health behavior. To examine these research areas, I have been conducting the entire human-centered design process by designing, building, and evaluating novel health technologies in collaboration with local community partners.