Fitviz: A personal informatics tool for self-management of rheumatoid arthritis

Abstract

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) affects 1 in 100 adults in Canada. Self-management of this disease requires that the patients maintain an adequate level of daily physical activity, while not overdoing it; excessive physical activity can be harmful to RA patients. The RA patients receive regular physical activity recommendations from their clinicians, based on the condition of their disease. Current solutions for physical activity monitor do not satisfy the needs of the arthritis patients and their clinicians, as they do not allow the patients and the clinicians to know if the patients did the physical activity as recommended by the clinicians. Therefore, we developed a web application which monitors patient’s daily physical activity, and generates visualizations to help the patients in the self-management of the disease. In this paper, we present the design of the application and the interim results of an ongoing pilot study that we are conducting to evaluate our prototype.