Abstract
More than a third of people over the age of 65 fall every year in the UK (Department of Health, 2009). General gait problems and weakness are amongst the most common specific precipitating causes for falls. (Rubenstein, 2006). Qualitative research conducted by the investigators (Jan - May 2014) indicates that people do not consider balance health to be an actionable component of their overall health. This is because they do not have the vocabularies or tools to objectively define it on an everyday basis. We designed an application which can be used to quantify postural sway in the home setting, and conducted a drawing study to explore visual perceptions of balance. The emerging forms were used as inspiration to develop three categories, which communicate four core attributes in different ways. The aim is to distill an elegant information strategy, which can lead to balance health being considered as actionable rather than unalterable.
Keywords
human centred design; preventative healthcare ; provocation; visual literacy
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2016.330
Citation
Grover, S., Johnson, S., Atkin, R., and Mcginley, C. (2016) A user centred approach to developing an actionable visualisation for ‘balance health’, in Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Future Focused Thinking - DRS International Conference 2016, 27 - 30 June, Brighton, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2016.330
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
A user centred approach to developing an actionable visualisation for ‘balance health’
More than a third of people over the age of 65 fall every year in the UK (Department of Health, 2009). General gait problems and weakness are amongst the most common specific precipitating causes for falls. (Rubenstein, 2006). Qualitative research conducted by the investigators (Jan - May 2014) indicates that people do not consider balance health to be an actionable component of their overall health. This is because they do not have the vocabularies or tools to objectively define it on an everyday basis. We designed an application which can be used to quantify postural sway in the home setting, and conducted a drawing study to explore visual perceptions of balance. The emerging forms were used as inspiration to develop three categories, which communicate four core attributes in different ways. The aim is to distill an elegant information strategy, which can lead to balance health being considered as actionable rather than unalterable.