Yunzhi Li
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania, United States
Upper extremity (UE) health issues are a common concern among wheelchair users and have a large impact on their independence, social participation, and quality of life. However, despite the well-documented prevalence and negative impacts, these issues remain unresolved. Existing solutions (e.g. surgical repair, conservative treatments) often fail to promote sustained UE health improvement in wheelchair users' day-to-day lives. Recent HCI research has shown the effectiveness of health tracking technologies in supporting patients' self-care for different health conditions (e.g. chronic diseases, mental health). In this work, we explore how health tracking technologies could support wheelchair users' UE health self-care. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 wheelchair users and 5 therapists to understand their practices and challenges in UE health management, as well as the potential benefits of integrating health tracking technologies into self-care routines. We discuss design implications for UE health tracking technologies and outline opportunities for future investigation.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580660
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2023.acm.org/)