Abstract

Personal technologies for everyday health management have the potential to transform healthcare by
empowering individuals to engage in their own care, scaffolding access to critical information, and
supporting patient-centered decision-making. Currently, many personal health tools often focus only on a
single task or isolated event. However, chronic illnesses are characterized by information needs and
challenges that shift over time; thus, these illnesses are better defined as a dynamic trajectory than a series
of singular events.
In this talk, I discuss my work designing and implementing novel computing systems that: 1) support
chronic illness trajectories and 2) reduce patients’ barriers to health information access. I’ll present my
approach using personalized and adaptive content to connect individuals with timely and actionable
feedback. Using results from longitudinal field deployments, I demonstrate the ability for these tools to
facilitate patients’ proactive health management and engagement in their care. I’ll also discuss the utility
of this approach for encouraging to long-term engagement with health tools, as evidenced by longitudinal
usage patterns. I’ll conclude with opportunities for using personalization as a strategy to support other
complex information tasks, including the health management of illness trajectories in which uncertainty is
paramount and the integration of machine learning models into clinical workflows.