Designing intelligent self-checkup based technologies for everyday healthy living

• Published in: International journal of human-computer studies 2022-10, Vol.166, p.102866, Article 102866
• Main Authors: Jiang, Yanqi, Ding, Xianghua, Liu, Di, Gui, Xinning, Zhang, Wenqiang, Zhang, Wei
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Everyday health; Healthy living; Intelligent health technology; Lifestyle technology; Personalized healthcare; Preventive health; Self-checkup; Traditional Chinese Medicine
• ISSN: 1071-5819; 1095-9300
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2022.102866

•We explored the combination of intelligent self-checkup and personalized lifestyle technologies to support everyday healthy living.•We performed iterative design of a mobile prototype featuring adaptability, flexibility, and transparency for meaningful engagement with intelligent health technologies.•We conducted a field trial of the prototype and gained insights into how such intelligent health technologies can be used and designed for everyday healthy living. Recent years have seen increasing interest in health promotion or disease prevention, rather than disease treatment/management, as a more cost-effective approach towards healthcare. Technologies designed to help build healthy habits, or lifestyle technologies, have important roles to play in that respect. However, so far, they are mainly explored without considering individual health statuses, which may lead to people’s excessive pursuit of quantified goals and cause negative health outcomes. In addition, while AI-powered health checkup technologies have become available for consumers to assess health on their own, they are mainly disease-oriented, and their potential for preventive health – everyday health assessment and early interventions through lifestyle changes – has been largely under-explored. This paper attempts to combine intelligent self-checkup and personalized lifestyle technologies so as to provide suggestions based on personal health status, as a potentially more effective approach to support preventive health in everyday life, or everyday healthy living as we call it in this paper. In particular, we present the iterative design process of a mobile application which supports AI-powered everyday health assessment based on face examination and adaptive inquiry, and provides personalized and adaptive lifestyle advice. Design improvements were made based on the first pilot study, and a 4-week field trial of the final design prototype reveals a number of design implications for intelligent health technologies to better support everyday healthy living.