User-centered design for supporting the self-management of chronic illnesses

This paper describes an interdisciplinary, user-centered approach to the design of healthcare technologies, involving clinicians, therapists, developers, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Health and Social Care researchers. Our starting point has been to understand patients' experiences of becoming ill through a series of focus groups with health professionals, patients and their carers. We used the metaphor of illness as a journey to capture those experiences. We have also reviewed data in the public domain (http://www.healthtalkonline.org). We have employed a theoretical framework which combines concepts from Activity Theory and other social sciences approaches to model illnesses. We outlined a set of design concepts for the design of the SMART 2 system which are emerging from our analysis of the patient experience.