Affective Health – designing for empowerment rather than stress diagnosis

• 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.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Systemvetenskap, informationssystem och informatik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Information Systems (hsv//eng)

Keyword

stress management

bio-sensors

Computer and systems science

Data- och systemvetenskap

Man-Machine-Interaction (MMI)

människa-maskin-interaktion (mmi)

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)