Affective Health: designing for empowerment rather than stress diagnosis

Conference paper

Pedro Sanches, Elsa Kosmack Vaara, Marie Sjölinder, Claus Weymann, Kristina Höök
Know Thyself: Monitoring and Reflecting on Facets of One's Life at CHI 2010, Atlanta, GA, 2010 Apr 10

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APA Click to copy
Sanches, P., Vaara, E. K., Sjölinder, M., Weymann, C., & Höök, K. (2010). Affective Health: designing for empowerment rather than stress diagnosis. In Know Thyself: Monitoring and Reflecting on Facets of One's Life at CHI 2010. Atlanta, GA.

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Sanches, Pedro, Elsa Kosmack Vaara, Marie Sjölinder, Claus Weymann, and Kristina Höök. “Affective Health: Designing for Empowerment Rather than Stress Diagnosis.” In Know Thyself: Monitoring and Reflecting on Facets of One's Life at CHI 2010. Atlanta, GA, 2010.

MLA Click to copy
Sanches, Pedro, et al. “Affective Health: Designing for Empowerment Rather than Stress Diagnosis.” Know Thyself: Monitoring and Reflecting on Facets of One's Life at CHI 2010, 2010.

BibTeX Click to copy

@inproceedings{sanches2010a,
  title = {Affective Health: designing for empowerment rather than stress diagnosis},
  year = {2010},
  month = apr,
  day = {10},
  address = {Atlanta, GA},
  author = {Sanches, Pedro and Vaara, Elsa Kosmack and Sjölinder, Marie and Weymann, Claus and Höök, Kristina},
  booktitle = {Know Thyself: Monitoring and Reflecting on Facets of One's Life at CHI 2010},
  month_numeric = {4}
}

When designing Affective Health, a mobile stress management tool using biosensors, we gradually understood how severely limited inferences can be when we move from laboratory situations to everyday usage. We also came to understand the strong connection between our subjectively perceived resources for dealing with stress and healing. Therefore, rather than employing a diagnose-and-treat design model, we propose that designers empower users to make their own reflections and interpretations of their own bio-sensor data. We show how this can be done through encouraging reflection, alternative interpretations and active appropriation of biosensor data – avoiding a reductionist, sometime erroneous, mediation of automatic interpretation from bodily data to emotion models or, in this case, stress diagnosis.