Understanding the Perspective of Prostate Cancer Patients to Support Multiple Health Behavior Change

What is it about?

Research suggests a lifestyle with specific diet, physical activity, and smoking cessation may prevent the progression and recurrence of non-metastatic prostate cancer. Adopting this lifestyle often requires multiple health behavior changes. While health behavior change is well-explored in HCI, the current context differs from past work. It has implications for how technology could support health behavior changes in this specific context. We provided prostate cancer patients with a website, text messages, and activity trackers to understand their experience with health behavior change interventions. Two focus group interviews conducted after the study revealed specific issues regarding these interventions. We found that patients interpreted the recommendations based on their existing understanding of healthy lifestyle and that the inability to measure cancer progression made health behavior change more challenging. Our findings also indicate a gap between the expectation of the researchers and the patients regarding technology. These results have implications for design of technology-enhanced interventions to support health behavior change in other similarly constrained contexts.

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Photo by Onur Binay on Unsplash

Photo by Onur Binay on Unsplash