Handheld computer for personal health advice

The overall objectives of the project were to conceive, design, implement and evaluate a portable personal health advisor. The system would integrate data from various sources and handheld computers on a real-time basis to provide "advice" (intelligent and knowledge) anytime and anywhere so that a consumer can take practical and immediate actions to maximize their vitality to enjoy life. The conception phase included the identification of technologies and approach to deliver personal and real-time advice at points of decision. Using this knowledge, I developed a prototype in the context of a person shopping in a pharmacy or market to ensure that foods, medicines or other products do not pose hazards relative to that person's known medical condition. In order to implement a real-life and thus estimate the usability and the user's perception of the system, we chose to focus on Type II diabetics in this first phase. A field test was run at a Research Laboratory of the major project sponsor, Procter & Gamble. The experiment confirmed the great appeal of decision-aiding system for people who have to manage strict or complex diet. It also underlined its design challenges, because even an ubiquitous device that provides "perfect advice" would promote a long-term behavior change only if human factor issues related to trust, privacy and user perception are carefully analyzed. It finally revealed the need for a trusted infrastructure, and some of the difficulties to overcome in order to implement the system in a large scale.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2002

Author dc:creator

• Hutchings, Cédric (Cédric Nils), 1976-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Thomas B. Sheridan.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8095

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/8095