“I think it saved me. I think it saved my heart”: The Complex Journey From Self-Tracking With Wearables To Diagnosis
Rachel Keys, Paul Marshall, Graham Stuart & Aisling O'Kane. 2024.
Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Despite their nonclinical origins, wearables are emerging as valuable tools in supporting the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Diagnostic data once only available via a cardiologist is now available to consumers simply by wearing a smartwatch, so understanding how smartwatches currently support diagnosis is important for healthcare providers and for the designers of increasingly sophisticated personal informatics technology. We conducted a qualitative study comprising interviews and analysis of posts on an online community of accounts of smartwatch assisted cardiac diagnosis. Our findings reveal how smartwatches bridge a current gap in clinical diagnostic modalities, facilitating a diagnostic journey instigated and shaped by the interplay of self-collected data, bodily self-awareness, and increasing clinical acceptance. These insights focus attention on the consequences of the democratisation of health data, with ethical and design implications for health providers, consumer electronic companies, and third-party application designers.
Citation
Keys, R., Marshall, P., Stuart, G., & O'Kane, A. A. (2024). “i think it saved me. i think it saved my heart”: the complex journey from self-tracking with wearables to diagnosis. Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642701, doi:10.1145/3613904.3642701
BibTeX
@inproceedings{10.1145/3613904.3642701, author = {Keys, Rachel and Marshall, Paul and Stuart, Graham and O'Kane, Aisling Ann}, title = {“I think it saved me. I think it saved my heart”: The Complex Journey From Self-Tracking With Wearables To Diagnosis}, year = {2024}, isbn = {9798400703300}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642701}, doi = {10.1145/3613904.3642701}, abstract = {Despite their nonclinical origins, wearables are emerging as valuable tools in supporting the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Diagnostic data once only available via a cardiologist is now available to consumers simply by wearing a smartwatch, so understanding how smartwatches currently support diagnosis is important for healthcare providers and for the designers of increasingly sophisticated personal informatics technology. We conducted a qualitative study comprising interviews and analysis of posts on an online community of accounts of smartwatch assisted cardiac diagnosis. Our findings reveal how smartwatches bridge a current gap in clinical diagnostic modalities, facilitating a diagnostic journey instigated and shaped by the interplay of self-collected data, bodily self-awareness, and increasing clinical acceptance. These insights focus attention on the consequences of the democratisation of health data, with ethical and design implications for health providers, consumer electronic companies, and third-party application designers.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems}, articleno = {138}, numpages = {15}, keywords = {Cardiovascular Disease, Self-Tracking}, location = {Honolulu, HI, USA}, series = {CHI '24} }