Self-Care Technologies in HCI

TLDR

Self‑care technologies can support patients with chronic conditions and their carers in understanding the ill body and increasing control of their condition, yet most research has a medical focus and neglects how patients and carers integrate self‑care into daily life and mediate conditions through technology. This review examines how patients and carers use and experience self‑care technology from an HCI perspective, and identifies opportunities to advance HCI research by focusing on everyday life experience, existing collaborations, and influencing medical research and practice. We analyze self‑care studies from key HCI venues using a Grounded Theory Literature Review to identify research trends and design tensions.

Abstract

Many studies show that self-care technologies can support patients with chronic conditions and their carers in understanding the ill body and increasing control of their condition. However, many of these studies have largely privileged a medical perspective and thus overlooked how patients and carers integrate self-care into their daily lives and mediate their conditions through technology. In this review, we focus on how patients and carers use and experience self-care technology through a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lens. We analyse studies of self-care published in key HCI journals and conferences using the Grounded Theory Literature Review (GTLR) method and identify research trends and design tensions. We then draw out opportunities for advancing HCI research in self-care, namely, focusing further on patients’ everyday life experience, considering existing collaborations in self-care, and increasing the influence on medical research and practice around self-care technology.