What is it about?
We describe a user study of a mHealth prototype system based on a wellbeing scenario, exploiting the quantified- self approach to measurement and monitoring. We have used off-the-shelf equipment, with opensource, web-based, software, and exploiting the increasing popularity of smartphones and self- measurement devices in a user study. We emulate a mHealth scenario as a pre-clinical experiment, as a realistic alternative to a clinical scenario, with reduced risk to sensitive patient medical data.
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Why is it important?
We discuss the efficacy of this approach for future mHealth systems for remote monitoring. Our system used the popular Fitbit device for monitoring personal wellbeing data, the Diaspora online social media platform (OSMP), and a simple Android/iOS remote notification application. We implemented remote moni- toring, asynchronous user interaction, multiple actors, and user- controlled security and privacy mechanisms. We propose that the use of a quantified-self approach to mHealth is particularly valuable to undertake research and systems development.
Perspectives
Our user study highlights issues to be considered in specific situations. However, we find a good correspondence between the wellbeing scenario and a mHealth scenario, by our use of a carer network – a socially-related group of actors in a typical healthcare regime. We believe that the use of wellbeing monitoring as a proxy for mHealth monitoring would more easily facilitate user studies and trials in the early research stages of mHealth applications, to make faster progress of advancing future mHealth systems. From our results, we also propose that mHealth systems could be more successfully developed and deployed if users are more engaged by having visibility of their own data and being given control of who sees that data.
Prof Saleem N Bhatti
University of St Andrews
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: mHealth through quantified-self: A user study, October 2015, Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE),
DOI: 10.1109/healthcom.2015.7454520.
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