Temporal Data in a Health Self-
Management Application


Abstract
Individuals frequently take an active role in managing
day-to-day aspects of their health, like improving
nutrition or increasing physical activity. Clinicians also
increasingly teach health self-management skills to
patients with a range of chronic illnesses, such as
diabetes, hypertension or arthritis. In this position
paper, we present our initial work in designing and
developing Salud!, a web-based platform for supporting
health self-management. Salud! will allow its users to
track personally-relevant aspects of their everyday life,
and provide visualization and analytics tools with which
to make sense of the resulting datasets. In effect,
Salud! is a health-oriented, capture and analysis tool
for temporal data. We describe the features of Salud!
that will enable users to easily capture temporal data,
and to use this data in a number of ways. We conclude
by discussing how we have structured Salud!’s data
storage system, and our plan for addressing the
challenge of designing temporal data visualization and
analytics tools for a broad, lay user base.
Keywords
Health self-management, temporal data, analytics Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
CHI 2009, April 4 – 9, 2009, Boston, MA, USA
ACM 978-1-60558-246-7/09/04.
Yevgeniy Medynskiy
GVU Center
Georgia Institute of Technology
eugenem@gatech.edu

Andrew Miller
GVU Center
Georgia Institute of Technology
andrew.miller@gatech.edu

Jae Wook Yoo
GVU Center
Georgia Institute of Technology
jyoo@gatech.edu

Elizabeth Mynatt
GVU Center
Georgia Institute of Technology
mynatt@cc.gatech.edu

2
Figure 1. WeightWatchers e-Tools allow users to chart their
progress toward a weight goal.
ACM Classification Keywords
H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g.,
HCI): Miscellaneous.
Introduction
Patients with a chronic illness, such as diabetes, heart
disease or asthma, are often called upon by clinicians
to actively participate in the day-to-day management of
their health. Health self-management, which may
include making healthy decisions about diet or exercise,
quitting unhealthy habits and solving other health
problems, complements traditional healthcare practices
and supports patients in living the best possible quality
of life with their condition. Studies have found that
successful health self-management education and
group support programs improve patient outcomes and
reduce healthcare costs [1,4].
A feeling of self-efficacy—confidence to carry out a
behavior necessary to reach a desired goal—is central
to effective health self-management. It is enhanced
when patients succeed in solving problems which they
themselves identify. Improving self-efficacy and
motivation is also important for individuals without
chronic illness, but who are trying to lose weight, eat
better or otherwise promote their health and wellness.
A growing number of commercial and research systems
attempt to support individuals in achieving their health
goals. For example, Fish’n’Steps [3] and Chick Clique
[6] leverage competition and peer-pressure to motivate
users to become more physically active. Consumer
technologies, such as iPod Nike+, potentially support
motivation and increase self-efficacy by allowing
individuals to track their progress in achieving a specific
goal. Similarly, many online services such as
WeightWatchers e-Tools (Figure 1) allow individuals to
record and track a wide range of information (often
temporal) relating to health and wellness [2]. The
features which these services provide have only limited
support for health self-management, however. Most
provide only basic views of a user’s data, which may be
laid out in a table or calendar, or plotted as a line
through time. While this may help users stay motivated
by visualizing long-term trends, there is little support
for decision-making or identifying and overcoming
obstacles to improvement. Additionally, users are
limited to the particular measurements a service
supports (e.g., weight), which may be insufficient for a
range of health goals.