Understanding challenges and opportunities of preventive blood pressure self-monitoring at home

Abstract

The herein presented study explores socio-technical complexities that may occur when introducing preventive health-measurement technologies in older adults' daily routines and everyday lives. Using mainly blood pressure measurements in private homes, the study applied qualitative and quantitative methods to understand existing challenges and uncover opportunities of self-monitoring technologies to support preventive healthcare activities among older adults. Emerging challenges from our study were: rule complexity for self-measuring, reliability of measurements, interpretation, understanding and health awareness, the sharing activity for prevention, motivational sources, the role of the doctor for prevention, older adult's use of technology, the home as a distributed information space, and visualization of health data. An awareness of these challenges can help designers to develop better tools to support people's preventive self-monitoring needs compared with existing solutions. Furthermore, supporting the active and informed citizen can improve older adult's care abilities, awareness and activation towards preventive care.