Intergenerational Sharing of Health Data among Family Members Project

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During my 2nd year Ph.D. program, I collaborated as Research Assistant at Design Square Lab. My supervisor was assistant professor Dr. Eun Kyoung Choe: https://terpconnect.umd.edu/~choe/

The project was called Intergenerational Sharing of Health Data among Family members. This project will inform the design of technology that will support tracking and sharing of health and well-being information between elderly parents and their adult children. I collaborated in the project design and prototyping, I recruited participants and conducted interviews, and I lead focus group sessions with participants. Currently, I am performing a qualitative data analysis by creating a code scheme and investigating design implications.

Poster publication:

Intergenerational Sharing of Health Data among Family Members 
Jomara Bindá, Natalie Cope, Hyehyun Park, Chien Wen (Tina) Yuan, John M. Carroll and Eun Kyoung Choe. 2017. 
In Proceedings of the 11th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, ACM.

Here are more details about the project:

Introduction

An explosion of affordable commercial wearable sensing devices and mobile health applications has opened up new possibilities to practice self-tracking and enjoy its benefits. However, elders often do not engage with health tracking technologies because they do not see much benefits.

  • Leveraging the inherent reciprocal relationship among family members is one potential approach to promote the practice of health tracking.

GOALS

  • We apply a proactive framing of family health as a collective and collaborative family project of mutual support: each member is helping one another to be more active and engaged for health.
  • Specifically, we want to utilize the inherent reciprocity of aiding among family members to shift what appears to be a burden into caring for one another.
  • Goal: examine how an intergenerational sharing of health data among family members mediated by technology could help family members be more aware of one anothers’ and their own health, and create a culture of health within family.

Study Materials

➔Two studies: Interviews and Focus Group

  • Semi-structured Interview
    • Participants:
      • Adult Children: 14 participants; 23- 68 years old
      • Elderly Parent: 10 participants; 68 – 85 years old
    • Questions:
      • Health-related Practices
      • Level of Awareness
  • Scenarios
    • Participants:
      • Adult Children: 18 participants; 21- 60 years old
      • Sandwich Generation: 7 participants; 51- 60 years old
      • Elderly Parent: 12 participants; 61 – 91 years old
    • Topics:
      • Family Relationship
      • Distance
      • Health Conditions
      • Different technology: photo frame, Fitbit

Preliminary Results

  • Information Awareness
    • Routinely talked about health and well-being
    • Previous illness increases awareness
    • Geographic Distance
  • Tensions around Sharing
    • Changing of family roles
    • Need to probe information
    • Parents’ behavior (i.e. “stubborn”)
  • Concerns on Sharing Personal Health Data
    • Intruding family members’ lives
    • Burdening family members with their problems
    • “News worthy”

Jomara Bindá

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