Summary
Adolescent users of medical technologies and healthcare services are often overlooked in the design and development of these products, with their requirements neither understood nor rarely sought. The consequences of this can be poor uptake and compliance, misuse and low satisfaction during the formative adolescent years, which can negatively impact on long term health behaviours.
The tensions between adolescent development and health behaviours will be explored in relation to how technology has the ability to facilitate health promotion and healthy living or conversely how poor design can inadvertently lead to negative health behaviours.
This presentation will describe the problem space and present a set of case studies investigating the challenges, barriers and opportunities associated with researching and designing for the health and wellbeing of teenagers. The health technology case studies will include physical hardware devices for treatment and monitoring of health conditions, singular apps for mental health and well being and large scale integrated software platforms. Throughout these case studies the ethical, technological, social and cultural standpoints will be examined against the backdrop of teenage development and user requirements.
Questions and Notes
Thanks for the seminar and the chat afterwards (and, in advance, the paper you promised).
I am very interested in the relations between the ‘problem space’, which you propose and the investigative case-study outcomes, which you report. I have three specific questions:
1. What is the relationship between the ‘problem space’ and the case-study outcomes? Should the results of the latter be understood as a possible ‘solution space’ for the problems, identified in the former? If not, what is the relationship and how are the results to be carried forward (especially by other researchers). carry-forward is an essential requirement of all research, I would suggest?
2. How can the relationship in 1. be expressed – presumably as guidance or some such? This is a requirement deriving from the ‘designing’ aspects of your talk, as presaged by the title.
3. How can the relationship in 1. be tested and even generalised (the touch-stone of all HCI research).
I hope these questions are of some interest to you. You can reply, if you so choose, either by the UCLIC LInkedin discussion group or to me directly <j.long@ucl.ac.uk>
Thanks again for the seminar.