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Background: Personal health technologies, including wearable tracking devices and mobile apps, have great potential to equip the general population with the ability to monitor and manage their health. However, being designed for sighted people, much of their functionality is largely inaccessible to the blind and low-vision (BLV) population, threatening the equitable access to personal health data (PHD) and health care services. Objective: This study aims to understand why and how BLV people collect and use their PHD and the obstacles they face in doing so. Such knowledge can inform accessibility researchers and technology companies of the unique self-tracking needs and accessibility challenges that BLV people experience. Methods: We conducted a web-based and phone survey with 156 BLV people. We reported on quantitative and qualitative findings regarding their PHD tracking practices, needs, accessibility barriers, and work-arounds. Results: BLV respondents had strong desires and needs to track PHD, and many of them were already tracking their data despite many hurdles. Popular tracking items (ie, exercise, weight, sleep, and food) and the reasons for tracking were similar to those of sighted people. BLV people, however, face many accessibility challenges throughout all phases of self-tracking, from identifying tracking tools to reviewing data. The main barriers our respondents experienced included suboptimal tracking experiences and insufficient benefits against the extended burden for BLV people. Conclusions: We reported the findings that contribute to an in-depth understanding of BLV people’s motivations for PHD tracking, tracking practices, challenges, and work-arounds. Our findings suggest that various accessibility challenges hinder BLV individuals from effectively gaining the benefits of self-tracking technologies. On the basis of the findings, we discussed design opportunities and research areas to focus on making PHD tracking technologies accessible for all, including BLV people.
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A Review of Personal Informatics Research for People with Motor Disabilities
Personal informatics (PI) has become an area of significant research over the past decade, maturing into a sub-field that seeks to support people from many backgrounds and life contexts in collecting and finding value in their personal data. PI research includes a focus on people with chronic conditions as a monolithic group, but currently fails to distinguish the needs of people with motor disabilities (MD). To understand how current PI literature addresses those needs, we conducted a mapping review on PI publications engaged with people with MD. We report results from 50 publications identified in the ACM DL, Pubmed, JMIR, SCOPUS, and IEEE Xplore. Our analysis shows significant incompatibilities between the needs of individuals with MD and the ways that PI literature supports them. We also found inconsistencies in the ways that disability levels are reported, that PI literature for MD excludes non-health-related data domains, and an insufficient focus on PI tools' accessibility and usability for some MD users. In contrast with Epstein et al.'s [36] recent PI review, behavior change and habit awareness were the most common motivation in these publications. Finally, many of the reviewed articles reported involvement by caregivers, trainers, healthcare providers, and researchers across the PI stages. In addition to these insights, we provide recommendations for designing PI technology through a user-centric lens that will broaden the scope of PI and include people regardless of their motor abilities.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2146420
- PAR ID:
- 10399117
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2474-9567
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 31
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3534614
