Telling the Story Right
Bastian Ilsø Hougaard, Hendrik Knoche · 2019
Data visualizations of training performance can provide patients with insight and motivation to engage in future self-training sessions. Still, patients are in practice prone to misinterpret their data in practice due to lack of health numeracy. This paper contributes an ethnographic case study of how an occupational therapist employed storytelling to help 14 sub-acute stroke patients interpret visualizations of their training performance from a cognitive rehabilitation game. The Trail Making Test based game visualized performance through a timeline, heat maps, and aggregate visualizations codesigned with the therapist. The interactive visualizations enabled the therapist to strategically order and emphasize information to support patients' understanding of their health. We provide an analysis of the therapist's storytelling strategy in cognitive training that depended on patient self-awareness. The paper concludes with a discussion of tensions for designing storytelling in visualizations of health data for self-care systems targeted at stroke patients in clinical and home contexts.