Design Self-Diagnosis Applications for Non-Patients
Jason Chen Zhao, Ngai‐Man Cheung, Ricardo Sosa, Dawn C. I. Koh · 2015
Self-diagnosis applications refer to a type of accessible healthcare systems that help users detect illness at the early stages. Unlike self-monitoring applications, users of self-diagnosis applications are non-patients - people who do not have the explicit awareness of their potential diseases or health problems. It is not clear how to incentivize usage, how to best present results, and how to sustain habit formation for periodic long-term use. We conduct an exploratory case study to investigate the special design challenges of such systems. From our findings, we recommend self-diagnosis applications should: 1) be designed with less perceived harmfulness; 2) state the risk of diagnosed disease explicitly; 3) show the implicit diagnosis result with percentage; and 4) present the rationale behind the diagnosis result.