The shape of health: A comparison of five alternative ways of visualizing personal health and wellbeing
This work addresses how visualization affects health comprehension for general users, but it is incremental as it applies existing insight-based methods to a new domain.
The study compared five visualizations of personal health data to assess their impact on understanding, finding that adequate visualization helps non-medical users better grasp overall health and lifestyle risks, based on an experiment with 30 participants.
The combination of clinical and personal health and wellbeing data can tell us much about our behaviors, risks and overall status. The way this data is visualized may affect our understanding of our own health. To study this effect, we conducted a small experiment with 30 participants in which we presented a holistic overview of the health and wellbeing of two modeled individuals, one of them with metabolic syndrome. We used an insight-based methodology to assess the effectiveness of the visualizations. The results show that adequate visualization of holistic health data helps users without medical background to better understand the overall health situation and possible health risks related to lifestyles. Furthermore, we found that the application of insight-based methodology in the health and wellbeing domain remains unexplored and additional research and methodology development are needed.