Sociocultural Dimensions of Tracking Health and Taking Care

Abstract

The field of personal health informatics has received increasing attention within the CSCW and HCI communities as health tracking becomes more affordable, accessible, and pervasive. Chronic disease management, in particular, presents tremendous potential for intervention given patients' ability to now actively participate in their care through tracking. The focus on 'personal' in health informatics, however, obfuscates the role of other cultural and ecological factors that might shape health tracking behaviors, and important information from alternative sources could be ignored by virtue of being subjective, complex, or simply hard to collect. To dig deeper into these negative spaces that may go untracked, uncover potential sources of important health information, and more completely understand current tracking practices, we embarked on an interview study with patients with cardiac diseases in Bangalore, India. In this paper, we present these patients' current health management approaches that are culturally situated, identifying both motivations and barriers to tracking, their attitudes towards online information, as well as cultural and ecological influences on their perceptions of cardiac care. We then discuss the interplay between our findings and current notions of, and approaches towards, patient empowerment and datafication of health.