“Getting Over the Wow Factor: The Iterative Development of a Mobile Health Application”

In this presentation Dr Siek will describe the design and evaluation of a dietary intake monitoring application (DIMA) for a low-literacy, chronic kidney disease – stage 5 (CKD) patient population. She describes the design choices that were informed through an intensive, iterative design process and describes a 6 week field study with 18 CKD patients.

The results of the field study showed that designing for community abilities and culture overcame the “wow factor” a phenomena often seen with technology where people stop using the technology as soon as the novelty and initial excitement wears off. In the field study, 12 of the 18 participants used DIMA as much or more at the end of the study as they did at the beginning.

Dr Siek is an assistant professor in Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder where she leads the Wellness Innovation and Interaction Lab.

Her primary research interests are in human computer interaction, health informatics and ubiquitous computing. More specifically, she is interested in how sociotechnical interventions affect personal health and well being. Her research is supported by the national Institutes of health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the national Science Foundation, including a five year NSF Career award. Most recently, she received a Scottish Informatics and Coputer Science Alliance Distinguished Visiting Fellowship.

Prior to her appointment at Colarado she completed her Ph.D and M.S. at Indiana University – Bloomington in computer science and her B.S. in computer science at Eckerd College. She was a National Physical Science Consortium Fellow and a Ford Apprentice Scholar at Eckerd College. Katie is a member of the ACM-W Council and on the College Board AP.

For more information, please visit http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ksiek/ Click here to download slides