Tuesday 22 November 2016

The total customer experience

Last week, I had a delivery from DPD. At one level, it was very mundane (I received and signed for a parcel). At another, it was very positive: I could choose my deliver time to within an hour; I could even elect for a "green" slot when they were going to be in the area anyway (which obviously reduces their cost as well as simplifying my choice). Then on the day I could track the movement of my parcel online and anticipate pretty accurately when it would arrive. The user interface was good, and it was the "front end" of a good system that worked well. This made the overall experience of choosing, ordering and receiving the product much more pleasurable than it might otherwise have been.

In contrast, Samuel Gibbs reports on his experience of using novel Internet of Things tools to do something comparable for frequently bought products. Quite apart from the prospect of having dozens of IoT devices stuck up around the home, he highlights the challenges of receiving the goods once ordered, and of receiving goods in impractically large quantities. These new technologies aren't just about an easy-to-use button-press (like my "easy" button), but about the total customer experience of choosing, ordering and receiving... and someone needs to think that through properly too.

Tuesday 15 November 2016

Making time for mindfulness

You can't just design a new technology and assume people will use it. The app stores are littered with apps that are used once, or not at all. It's important to understand how people fit technologies into their lives (and how the design of the technology affects how it's used). We choose to use apps (or to be open to responding to them) in ways that depend on time and place. For example, on the train in the morning, lots of commuters seem to be accessing news via apps: it's a good opportunity to catch up with what's happening in the world, and my journey's an appropriate length of time to do that in.

We've recently published a paper on how people make time for mindfulness practices.
Participants were mostly young, urban professionals (so possibly not representative of a more general population!), and their big challenge was how to fit meditation practices in their busy lives. Mindfulness is difficult to achieve on a commute, for example, so people need to explicitly make time for it, in a place that feels right. There was a tension between making it part of a routine (and something that "has to be done" and making it feel like a choice (spontaneous?). But there were lots of other factors that shape when, how and whether people used the mindfulness app, such as their sense of self-efficacy (how much they feel in control of their lives), their mood (mindfulness when your upset or angry just isn't going to happen – not in ten minutes, anyway), and attitudes of friends to mindfulness (peer pressure is very powerful).

Some of these are factors that can't be designed for – beyond recognising that a mindfulness app isn't going to work for all people, or in all situations. Others can, perhaps, be designed for: such as managing people's expectations of what differences mindfulness might make in their lives, and giving guidance on when and how to fit in app use. What are some of the take-homes?
  • that incidental details (like the visual appearance or the sound of someone's voice) matter;
  • that people are one a 'journey' of learning how to practice mindfulness (don't force an expert to start at the beginning just because they haven't used this particular app before, for example);
  • that people need to learn how to fit app use and mindfulness into their lives, and expectations need to be managed; and
  • that engaging with the app isn't the same as engaging with mindfulness... but the one can be a great support for the other in the right circumstances.
 





Friday 28 October 2016

Guidance on creating, evaluating and implementing effective digital healthcare interventions

This is an unconventional blog post – essentially, a place to index a set of papers. Last year, I participated in a workshop: ‘How to create, evaluate and implement effective digital healthcare interventions: development of guidance’. 
The workshop was led by Susan Michie, and resulted in a set of articles discussing key issues facing the development and evaluation of digital behaviour change interventions. There were about 50 participants, from a variety of countries and disciplines. And we all had to work ... on delivering interdisciplinary papers as well as on discussion. The outcome has just been published.
Credits: The workshop was hosted in London by the Medical Research Council, with funding from the Medical Research Council (MRC)/National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Methodology Research Program, the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR)  and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.The workshop papers are being made publicly available with the agreement of the publishers of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Thursday 20 October 2016

If the user can't use it, it doesn't work: the invisible costs of bad software

This is a quick rant about unusable enterprise systems and turning visible costs into invisible costs. For an earlier, longer, discussions about different unusable systems, see my reviews of ResearchFish and an electronic healthcare system.

Yesterday, I was one of several people asked to use the Crown Commercial Services system to review some documents related to a bid for one of our public funding bodies. The use of this system is apparently mandated for that organisation.

I was sent instructions on how to do part of the process (which I could not have worked out from the user interface). I followed the instructions provided as far as they were relevant, and I then explored some more to try to locate the documents of the actual bids (which appeared to comprise 28 separate documents for eight bids). Then I tried to download them all in one file. 30 minutes later, the system timed out on me while still processing to create that file. When I logged back in I couldn’t locate the download window again without simply doing all the same actions a second time. And I ran out of time, energy or will to pursue this.

This is yet another example of a system where there is no evidence that the developers ever considered how the system would be used, by whom, under what circumstances, the learning curve to use it first time ... or anything else about the users. Susan Dray has a nice claim: "If the user can't use it, it doesn't work". This is yet another enterprise system that is absolutely not fit for purpose.

What this does is to shift costs from development (investing in making a system that is fit for purpose) to use (forcing every user of the system to waste time trying to achieve their goals despite the system). The former would be a visible cost to the developers and the people who commissioned the system while the latter is an invisible cost borne in all the stress and loss of productivity of the people who have to use the system. For the UK Research Evaluation Framework (REF), these invisible costs were estimated at almost £250 million. That was a one-off exercise; there should be a practice of estimating the annual costs of unusable enterprise systems. I'm pretty confident that the invisible costs would turn out to be significantly greater than the visible costs of creating a system that was fit for purpose in the first place. And we know how to do it. We have known how to do it for decades!

Wednesday 17 August 2016

Reflections on two days in a smart home

I've just had the privilege of spending two days in the SPHERE smart home in Bristol. It has been an interesting experience, though much less personally challenging than I had expected. For example, it did not provoke the intensity of reaction from me that wearing a fitbit did. What have I learned? That a passive system that just absorbs data that can't be inspected or interacted with by the occupier quickly fades into the background, but that it demands huge trust of the occupant (because it is impossible to anticipate what others can learn about one's behaviour from data that one cannot see). And that as well as being non-threatening, technology has to have a meaningful value and benefit to the user.

Reading the advance information about staying in the SPHERE house, I was reassured that they have considered safety and privacy issues well. I wasn't sure what to expect of the wearable devices or how accurate they would be. My experience of wearing a fitbit previously had left me with low expectations of accuracy. I anticipated that wearing devices in the house might make me feel like a lab rat, and I was concerned about wearing anything outside the house. It turned out that the only wearable was on the wrist, and was only worn in the house anyway, so less obtrusive than commercial wearables.

I had no idea of what interaction mechanisms to expect: I expected to be able to review the data that is being gathered in real time and wondered whether I would be able to draw any inferences from that data. Wrong! The data was never available for inspection, because of the experimental status of the house at the time.

When we arrived, it was immediately obvious that the house is heavily wired, but most of the technology is one-way (sucking information without giving anything back to the participant). Most of the rooms are quite sparse and magnolia. The dining room feels very high-tech, with wires and chips and stuff all over the place – more like a lab than a home. To me, this makes that room a very unwelcoming place to be, so we chose to eat dinner in the living room.

I was much more aware of the experimental aspects of the data gathering (logging our activities) than of the lifestyle (and related) monitoring. My housemate seemed to be quite distracted by the video recording for a while; I was less distracted by it than I had expected. The fact that I cannot inspect the data means that I have no option to reflect on it, so it quickly became invisible to me.
 
The data gathering that we did manually was meant to be defining the ‘ground truth’, but with the best will in the world I’m not sure how accurate the data we’ll provide was – we both keep forgetting to carry the phones everywhere with us, and kept forgetting to start new activities or finish completed one. Recording activities involves articulating the intention to do something (such as making a hot drink or putting shopping away) just before starting to do it, and then articulating that it has been finished when it’s over. This isn't natural! Conversely, at one point, I happened to put the phone on a bedside table and accidentally started logging "sleep" through the NFC tag!

By day 2, I was finding little things oppressive: the fact that the light in the toilet didn’t work and neither did the bedside lights; the lack of a mirror in the bedroom; the fact that everything is magnolia; and the trailing wires in several places around the house. I hadn't realised how important being "homely" was to me, and small touches like cute doorstops didn't deliver.

To my surprise, the room I found least private (even though it had no video) was the toilet: the room is so small and the repertoire of likely actions so limited that it felt as if the wearable was transmitting details that would be easily interpreted. I have no way of knowing whether this is correct (I suspect it is not).

At one point, the living room got very hot so I had to work out how to open the window; that was non-trivial and involved climbing on the sofa and the window sill to work out how it was secured. I wonder what that will look like as data, but at least we had fresh air! 

By the time we left, I was getting used to the ugliness of the technology, and even to the neutrality of the house colours. I had moved things around to make life easier – e.g., moving the telephone off my bedside table to make space for my water and phone (though having water next to the little PCB felt like an accident waiting to happen).

My housemate worked with the SPHERE team to visualize some data from three previous residents that showed that all three of them had eaten their dinners in the living room rather than the dining room. We both seemed to find this slightly amusing, but also affirming: other people are making the same decision as we did.

The main issue to me was that the ‘smart’ technology had no value to me as an inhabitant in the house in its current experimental state. And I would really expect to go beyond inspectability of data to interactivity before the value becomes apparent. Even then, I’m not sure whether the value is short- or long-term: is it about learning about health and behaviours in the home, or is it about real-time monitoring and alerting for health management? The long-term value will come with the latter; for the former, people might just want a rent-a-kit that allows them to learn about their behaviours and adapt them over maybe 2-3 months. But this is all in the future. The current home is a prototype to test what is technically possible. The team have paid a lot of attention to privacy and trust, but not much yet to value. That's going to be the next exciting challenge...

Friday 8 April 2016

Activity tracking: war and peace

I bought an activity tracker (a Fitbit) last August. I have worn it for two periods, each of about 2 months. The first was a time of discovery: about tracking, about myself, and about the relationship between the two. That period was a little turbulent at times. I kept a diary, which documents many of my discoveries. I’m reproducing some of this below… but happy to share the full diary if anyone is really interested. I am aware the diary exposes several misconceptions about how the tracking works, but that’s the wisdom of hindsight.

I re-started wearing the tracker shortly before speaking at an event on health data analytics, and its role was mostly as a prop for certain kinds of conversations. But I did also look at the stats occasionally. One day I did 29000 steps, apparently – though I think a lot of that was bouncing a baby around rather than actually walking anywhere… but that’s still exercise, so that must be OK! That second period finished recently, provoked by the tracker suffering a software error such that it would not tell me the time, when I was in a situation when I needed to know it. Also by the fact that I was on an active holiday but the stats bore no perceptible relation to the activity, so it seemed pretty pointless. At work, it can be a useful prop when discussing health tracking: it’s the well person’s surrogate for the kind of health data tracking that is more useful (or even necessary) for people who are suffering from a clinical condition. But for really tracking my activity, it misses the point.

So here are the ups and downs of my early engagement with activity tracking.

Wednesday 26th August

The postman brought the fitbit in a torn jiffybag this morning. The item is in a very smart box, which can’t be opened without destroying it. I like the plum colour, but I’m less keen on the bright pink plastic that’s behind the display – I hadn’t thought to check that before purchase. This fitbit is also bulkier than ones I’ve seen previously – those were obviously a different model. There are no instructions other than to go to the Fitbit setup site, and a safety warning (printed so small it’s clearly not intended to be read). There are two USB devices. One is a short cable with a weird plug on the end. After turning this around for a minute, I match the connector to a port that I locate on the back of the fitbit. I guess I need to plug the other end into my computer… The other usb device is a mystery, until I realize that it must be for connecting the fitbit to the computer remotely. Neat. No idea how this would work with a phone, but since my phone is too old to be compatible, that’s not going to be a problem! The setup instructions are reasonably intuitive, but I have to wait two hours for the fitbit to charge before I can explore it any more. I get an email message to tell me the fitbit needs charging. That’s probably a nice feature. So far, so good.

Some time later: the fitbit is charged. I unplug it and put it on. I run upstairs and then check the counters. I have apparently walked 6 paces and climbed 0 stairs. That’s not a good start – I don’t think this device requires explicit calibration, so I’m not sure how much I’m going to be able to trust its numbers. I think I’m wearing it correctly…

Later: walking around the house, I am self-consciously swinging my arms as I walk. I don’t know what this is doing to the tracking (it’s hard to be tracking the counting while walking – in fact it seems to make that impossible). I hope that this self-consciousness will pass quickly!
After a walk: I have apparently climbed 10 flights of stairs on my walk. I got a congratulatory email about it. I was stupidly aware of not putting hands in pockets so that my arm would swing naturally as I walked.

Thursday 27th August

Both yesterday and today, I intentionally climbed an extra flight of stairs to up my stairs statistic. This is the only exercise-behaviour modification I’m aware of so far.
I managed to get out for a proper walk at lunchtime (even got back before the next major rain shower). Apart from intentionally dangling my arm so that it swung, I don’t think my behaviour was shaped by the fitbit. When I got home I received a congratulatory email for exceeding 5000 steps today. Still finding this slightly entertaining, and wondering what the next email will be…

Friday 28th August

I have just come back from a longish walk where I had the explicit intention to hit 10000 steps. I walked briskly for almost an hour. When I got to a point where I thought that I could walk straight back to my desk and probably have done the steps, I looked at the counter. Not even 5000! So I decided to walk a bit further. Walked what I estimated to be 500 steps, but it registered less than 300. So then I started counting: walk briskly for 100 steps then stop and see how the display has changed. Did this three or four times; each time, it only registered about 70 steps. So the calibration seems to be way off. This made me feel slightly dispirited, cheated and angry: seems like I will have to actually walk about 13000 steps for it to register 10000.

Sunday 30th August

Yesterday we were decorating, so I took the fitbit off for much of the day. Result is low stats, but I don’t think it would have registered much for teetering at the top of a ladder and pushing a paint roller around (or even for carrying said ladder) anyway.
I’m feeling a slight pressure (self-imposed) to do more steps, but realistically I don’t know how to fit this into my life when I’m already stressed and over-stretched by other demands that do no require walking anywhere.

Tuesday 1st September

The walk to work (with a heavy bag) was apparently over 1500 steps. The walk home (lighter bag, more ‘power walking’) was 1070. If getting a high count is what matters then it’s better to walk more slowly and with hands tucked into waist strap of backpack than to walk briskly, though I’m sure the latter is actually better for one’s health. This is a rather perverse incentive.
Interestingly, I have apparently covered over 7000 steps just getting to work and getting home again without leaving the office all day. That’s more than I would have expected.

10.30pm: trip to the climbing wall (including getting there and getting home) clocked up 2000 steps but zero flights of stairs. Obviously too vertical! Today, I got an emailed weekly summary. It contains some crazy figures (sleep duration and weight change, for example) that have no basis in fact.

Thursday 3rd September

Yesterday, I got to 9552 steps without even trying, and without even going to meetings in other buildings (other than catching the tube to a meeting at the end of the day). I am struck by how many “invisible” steps I take in a day in the office – a huge number compared to a day at home. It doesn’t feel like exercise at all. Mind you, I also apparently took a few steps (25 or so, if I remember rightly) while sitting on the train, albeit moving my arms around as I sorted things out. Conversely, I only registered 125 steps in an hour of Pilates, and there wasn’t even a perceptible raise in heart-rate at that time: what a reader would infer from my stats in that hour was that I was happily ensconced on the sofa doing nothing. So the hour of the day when I felt that I pushed my body most (the hour that will make me feel drained today) is the hour that registered least effort on the fitbit.

12 noon: I am using the fitbit tracker as another ‘grazing place’ to look when I’m seeking distraction from my current task. This is not good!

3.30pm: I went for a walk. I walked fast to raise my heart rate, and I swung my right arm, but I intentionally kept my left arm in my pocket to get a more accurate step count. I probably looked ridiculous. I honestly do not know whether my decision to take a walk was influenced by having a tracker or not. I did feel like I needed to get out and get some fresh air, but I probably walked faster and further because of having the tracker. I guess this is a Good Thing.

4.30pm: I’ve just reduced my daily step target to 7000, which seems more achievable than 10000. Yesterday, I got to 9650, but still didn’t feel any incentive to do the extra 350 required to get over 10000, because I didn’t “own” the 10000 step goal, even if that is what is recommended. And even if I believe I could achieve it reasonably easily if only I had a better work-life balance. Maybe with targets that I have set for myself I will have a greater incentive to own them and meet them…

9pm: To get through 7000 steps and 5km, I went for another brisk walk this evening. On the way back, the fitbit vibrated – never felt that before. By the time I’d looked at it, it immediately showed a heartrate of 183. And a step count of 7007. I assume that the step rate was what I was being notified of. And I’m hoping that that heartrate was a blip. The day’s stats show a “peak” heartrate for 10 minutes. Frankly, this doesn’t make sense, since all I was doing was walking.

Friday 4th September

On the way to work this morning, I was thinking: today, 10000 steps is a reasonable target. But I’d set my target down to 7000 yesterday. So that was the point where my fitbit did its celebratory vibrate. Big deal! I feel the need (if this thing is to be useful) to set a reasonable target for each day, but I don’t think that’s possible.
Looking at my stats for this afternoon, I noted that my heart rate seemed to go up at a point when I was stressed (into the “fat burn zone”). I realize that I don’t know whether or not raised heart rate is always a good thing, or whether it’s only (implicitly) a good thing when associated with exercise (rather than stress).
Today I have received two ‘congratulatory’ emails. The first was on “walking a marathon” (over several days). Big deal: this is patronizing. The second was on walking 10000 steps in a day; given the previous messages received, I would have felt cheated had this message not been received.

Saturday 5th September

Today the 7000 steps and 5km targets did their work: an hour ago, I hadn’t quite hit either, but all it would take would be a walk to the end of the road to hit both. So I did that (actually, slightly more), and also walked fast to get a raised heart rate after a day of hosting friends at home. In fact I’ve done 6km and well over 8000 steps, but if the goal had been 10000 steps I probably wouldn’t have even done this last little walk.
The issue of precision and accuracy is irritating. The fitbit clearly isn’t very accurate – that’s fine if you’re doing a mix of activities where it all balances out, approximately, in the end, but it’s unhelpful if the day happens to have a lot of one kind of activity that is poorly recorded – e.g. a long walk that is under-recorded by 30% or a strenuous Pilates or climbing session that barely registers at all (conversely, I suspect a rattly train journey would over-record outrageously). But it’s very precise. On Thursday, it reckons I burned 1491 calories, so it ‘marks me down’ for not hitting 1500 (i.e. being out by 9 calories). But today I get a smiley face for burning 1526. Me having set the target at 1500, which is an arbitrary number. There is no ‘grey zone’ on the fitbit: either you achieved your target or you didn’t. Which would be fine if the numbers weren’t fictional.

Monday 7th September

Yesterday, what with going to a country park and then a ceilidh, I naturally covered 14900+ steps. At bedtime, I walked along the corridor and up the stairs one extra time just to get over 15000. This does not have a material effect on my exercise (or health) for the day, and it was just to get through that number. It seems unlikely that I'll get any bigger multiple of 5000 steps in a very long time, if ever.
Today: As I settled down for the evening, I checked my stats, and I was just-a-little-under on all of them (except stairs). The deciding one was 6 minutes under on ‘active minutes’, and little time in ‘peak zone’ of cardio. These could not be addressed by walking around the house enthusiastically. So I went for a short, sharp walk. Part way there, I felt the fitbit buzz the 7k steps notification, but that wasn’t what was mattering to me: I did want to get all the measures into the ‘green’ zone. The terms of ‘active minutes’ and ‘peak zone’ aren’t ones I’ve thought about before getting the tracker so, at least in the short term, they are encouraging behaviour change, just by suggesting to me that these things matter.

Tuesday 8th September

Been climbing again. Fitbit shows slightly raised heart rate this evening, but I have apparently only had 24 active minutes all day (which were the walks to and from the office) and only nine flights of stairs. On the other hand, I’ve apparently walked 1.3km at the wall: uh? So there is a substantive mismatch between the fitbit’s assessment of my activity and my own. I’m coming to terms with the approximate nature of its counting of steps when they really are steps, but “activity tracker” is seriously a misnomer.

Thursday 10th September

So busy yesterday that I didn’t check stats at any point in the day. Would have liked to have been able to see the whole day’s stats (as a single day), but was too tired when I got home. It’s slightly irritating that I can’t check them on the train (I’d have had time then) because it needs wifi.

Friday 11th September

I’m starting to feel a certain ennui with the dashboard. I now have a sense of what activities register what measurements. Maybe it’ll be interesting when I do something different (walking day or teaching day for example), but not getting excited about it at the moment.

Sunday 13th September

I’ve been to Wales for the weekend. Yesterday I could not access my daily stats at all because I didn’t have a computer or a wifi connection, so all I have is summary stats (presumably, unless I pay extra for premium). Today, when I got home and did a sync, I got two congratulatory emails: one about “the march of the penguins” – the distance walked since getting the fitbit; this just felt patronizing (it was going to happen some day…); the second a “skyscraper badge” for climbing 100 floors today. AKA doing a walk up a hill. I’m not sure that getting a “badge” for this is convincing. I’m more interested in how much cardiovascular exercise this might equate to, and that’s not very clear, even in the day stats. In the weekly stats, Friday (when I walked to work then to a meeting and then home) appears to perform better than today. Maybe that’s right, particularly since I spent a lot of today in the car after the lovely walk, but intuitively today was more taxing because it involved a lot of jumping from rock to rock and going up hill. So there is a dissonance between the stats and the subjective experience. Who’s to say which is more accurate?
p.s. Monday 14th: I sent the “skyscraper badge” to my walking partner because she had earned it too. A strange kind of social effect of the fitbit providing data for people who are sharing an activity.

15th September 2015

Yesterday, even though I did my usual distance of walking and number of flights of stairs, I apparently only had 14 ‘active minutes’. Must mean I was too casual about my walking. So today I walked in as quickly as possible – I want my active minutes!

16th September

Thinking back to the day when I had fewer ‘active minutes’ than expected: I wonder whether it was in my performance or in the device performance? Was it perhaps in the wrong place on my wrist? Or not functioning properly? I have just no way of knowing…
Just realized that I have apparently only clocked up 26 active minutes today. I find this irritating. Sure: it’s been an office-bound day, but I’ve expended effort when I could!

17th September 2015

On holiday. So haven’t done much exercise due to being on train and plane much of the day. Our apartment is ground floor, so not much chance of doing many steps for the next 10 days – where to find steps to do??
Sardinia is hot, and if I were wearing a watch I would be taking it off (too hot and sticky), but I find myself curiously reluctant to take off the tracker in case I lose data. My head knows that this is ridiculous.

18th September

The tracker is becoming a topic of discussion. When my partner and I are together, he is asking how far we have gone, and teasing me about number of flights climbed up sand dunes (which I don’t know since I disabled that feature on the tracker and the wifi isn’t working to check or change this). After lunch, we had apparently only done 300+ steps all day. Time for a walk! Had to take tracker off for a swim, so probably the most cardiovascular activity of the day is the part of the day that was not recorded at all. I’m not worried about this, but it does highlight a limitation of the tracking.
10.30pm: I have resorted to going out into the garden to get a wifi signal so as to update the tracking. Turns out that the tracker thinks I’ve done quite a lot of cardiovascular today (good: going up and down sand dunes does feel quite effortful!)

21st September

I am surprisingly annoyed when I check the tracker after a day of climbing stairs (to and in a grotto) and walking along very soft sand (hard going) to be told that I’ve only done 21 active minutes. And that the heart rate did not get anywhere near peak while running up stairs. Subjectively, I’ve had a more taxing day today than yesterday and yet the tracker thinks otherwise. And I shouldn’t care about it, but to a small degree I do. So partly I just don’t believe this thing and yet I seek affirmation from it.
As noted some time ago, I have reduced my target step count and distance to be ones that I can reasonably achieve in a day, even a work day, but while on holiday my unofficial targets are 10000 steps and 8km. But I’m not going to change the tracker targets to these numbers because I want it to confirm targets that I can reasonably achieve, and I don’t want to feel judged by it for not achieving targets (extrinsic values), while I will happily aim for intrinsic targets that are higher. There’s some strange psychology going on here that I haven’t quite made sense of, but it’s something to do with feeling that the tracker targets are somehow public while my personal targets are private, and I don’t want to be seen to fail on the public targets while the private targets are just between me and myself.
I’m learning to interpret flights of stairs more in the way that the tracker seems to measure them so am more accepting of its numbers than I was three weeks ago, when some of its stair counts seemed crazy.
As yet, I haven’t hit its calorie target once. I have no idea how this number is calculated, and hence how I could achieve it, other than I’m guessing by doing significantly more cardiovascular exercise. At this stage, it would be good if it gave explicit feedback / advice on this rather than focusing on stupid badges of quasi-achievement (the most recent was a ‘helicopter’ badge for total number of flights of stairs climbed – do me a favour!!).

24th September

A few quick observations:
1.     I still don’t understand what constitutes an ‘active minute’, since an energetic walk up a hill apparently didn’t count as one but a gentle stroll along a harbour wall did. Bizarre!
2.     I’ve noticed that we’re using the tracker to reconstruct what we did: as in “what time did we leave?” (i.e. start this walk?) “I don’t know but we can check on the tracker later”.
3.     We’re still using it as a shared object to motivate a little more exercise and stair counting than I would have done on my own without it.

27th September

Yesterday I did an extra short walk in the evening to get it over 20000 steps (though I didn’t bother to do the same the day before even though it would have been a realistic possibility). When I next sync it, I’m expecting a ‘badge’ for that.
The inability to see ‘active minutes’ without synching is slightly annoying, but only in the sense that I want to get ‘success’ on all its measures, regardless of how that correlates with my own assessment of my active minutes.

28th September

Yesterday evening, I heard my partner telling his brother about the fitbit and how it had shaped our holiday with motivations to be active and climb steps.
Today, I have walked quite a lot, and been consciously energetic about it, but it still hasn’t registered as ‘active’. I find this annoying, and I’m also annoyed with myself for being annoyed. I somehow accept that I can’t really control the calorie count, but I don’t accept so easily that I apparently can’t control what counts as an active minute.

30th September

With so many people now around Bloomsbury, it’s really hard to walk fast, so it’s really hard to get the ‘active minutes’ without being positively antisocial. Which form of guilt would you like? Being antisocial, or failing to be active?
It’s still so inaccurate. There’s little pleasure in being credited for climbing stairs (or whatever) that you know you didn’t do, but lots of frustration in not being credited for climbing stairs that you know you did do. The stairs climbing counter is particularly inaccurate, in my experience.
And yet this thing is quite addictive. The fact that it can act as a watch is a real asset (otherwise it would be a difficult choice) – though when giving a presentation it was awkward trying to keep track of my own timing, and I need to deal with that for teaching next week.
7.20pm: It’s only recorded 18 active minutes today despite me charging around between meetings and to the train this evening being antisocial and stressed. I. Must. Stop. Taking. Any. Notice. Of. Its. Arbitrary. Counts. Of. Poorly. Evidenced. Data / calculations. I feel that the tracker is adding to my stress in what is already a stressful week.

9th October

Yesterday I clocked up over 15000 steps without even trying. I was teaching for three hours and also had to travel for a meeting. Probably quite a few of the “steps” were just me waving my arms around while teaching, but it’s striking that on a “normal” teaching day I can get up to a step count that would normally denote a pretty significant walk – e.g., much more than last Sunday, when I “went for a walk”.

11th October

On Friday I had another conversation around the tracker: every time I tried to look at the time in a meeting, it displayed the steps, and I commented on this, leading to a wider discussion of tracking and trackers and smart watches. But I’m not finding the stats particularly interesting any more. I know how many steps I do on a home day, a work day, a day with meetings elsewhere… And it’s not motivating me to do extra steps at all as far as I’m aware.

20th October

On Sunday, my partner and I went for a walk up a hill. He wanted to know how many flights it was. More engagingly, when we later faced a rise in the road we had a bet on how many flights of stairs we thought it would be. We both thought three but the tracker thought five. It feels playful in this context.
I’m still wearing it, mostly because the costs of doing so are very low. Mind you, I’m not looking at my data very often now, so the benefits probably aren’t great either. I apparently haven’t done my 30 active minutes many days in the past week: tut tut.

21st October

It’s the evening again. Five days out of the past seven I have apparently not hit the 30 active minutes target. At one level, this make explicit something I already know about my lifestyle: that I work too much and don’t exercise enough. But given the demands of work, that just makes me feel disempowered and guilty.

23rd October

Yet again, I’m surprised to find that I wasn’t active when I climbed five flights of stairs. But I’ve just looked up the definition of an active minute and it’s “the activity you're doing is more strenuous than regular walking” and “minutes are only awarded after 10 minutes of continuous moderate-to-intense activity” and something to do with METs, whatever a MET is (“metabolic equivalents”??). So short sharp bursts will never count. But apparently my natural walking is more strenuous than regular walking, so I can relax on my walk to work because it’ll probably still count as active. Must try that on Monday…

25th October

Actually, I’m not going to try that on Monday because I’ve decided I’ve had enough of the fitbit. I don’t find any interest in looking at the stats unless I’ve done something extra-ordinary. And as noted earlier it has an interesting social / playfulness value when I’m spending a day with someone who finds the stats interesting. But I know that a day sitting at my laptop and going to the climbing wall is going to give underwhelming data (I just checked to be sure and indeed I have zero active minutes despite climbing until my arms gave out). So what’s the point? I might as well wear just a watch that is colour coordinated with my outfit and that shows me the time whenever I turn my wrist.

26th October

I’m wearing an ordinary watch today. This feels surprisingly liberating – no need to walk in a slightly artificial way just to get the fitbit to record steps reasonably accurately. I did catch myself on the way to work still putting my left hand in my pocket, so I had to concentrate on walking more normally. I have also caught myself putting my right hand to my watch to click it to show the time (not necessary) and also flicking my wrist in an exaggerated way to show the time (also not necessary). I’m wondering how long it’s now going to take to unlearn these practices – I didn’t really notice them developing into habits. It feels liberating not to be monitoring my actions to get the recording as accurate as possible, and not to feel monitored by the fitbit. I think I’ve learned the main things I can learn from it – e.g., how many steps it is to get to and from work (about 2000 each way), how many steps I do just walking around the building (about 1000, which is more than I would have expected), what is considered to be a healthy distance to walk in a day, and what constitutes an “active minute”. Now it feels good to move on.

Friday 4 March 2016

What's in it for me? The challenges of designing interventions for others

"Uninvited guests" is an entertaining short video showing possible, compelling, responses to well-meaning digital interventions for wellbeing that an elderly relative is encouraged to use.

Recently, a friend (I'll call her Hanna) told me about her experience of something similar, and it highlighted to me just how challenging it is to design well to help others to live well, and how important it is to make new designs of direct value, and easy to understand.

Hanna's parents are elderly, and had been plagued by nuisance calls: some just irritating, but others that involved mis-selling, "fixing" a computer virus, or otherwise leaving her parents feeling unsettled and cheated. She wanted to work with them to help avoid these calls. They installed Truecall on the line. And for a couple of weeks, it seemed to be working really well: letting through trusted callers while blocking unknown callers. A couple of unrecognised callers contacted her to request access and she extended the list of trusted callers in response. All good!

Then things started to unravel. An elderly acquaintance who wasn't on the list tried calling, did not understand the 'blocking message' immediately, and promptly drove round to her parents' house to ask what was going on. They found this really embarrassing, and it undermined their trust in the system. Hanna worked with her parents to add every known acquaintance to the list of trusted callers. But their fear of missing even one 'real' call had been triggered. At least: that was the surface presentation; I suspect there was more going on.

Apparently, when adding names to the list of trusted callers, Hanna's parents talked about the data entry as if they would then be able to use the list as a phone book. That would have been useful to them. But of course it didn't have that functionality (it's a call blocker, not a call enabler). They had a poor mental model of how Truecall worked and what it did. I'm guessing that this lack of understanding made them feel alienated and disempowered.

Hanna showed her parents their own call log, highlighting all the nuisance calls that had been blocked, and that therefore had not been disruptive. But this was apparently not persuasive at all: they could not remember the occasions where they had been persuaded by mis-selling, and now the concern about missing genuine calls dominated completely. Indeed, Hanna's parents seemed to grow in confidence regarding their ability to manage nuisance calls with every day that passed, and Truecall seemed to become a device that questioned their competence.

They told her about one of their friends also using Truecall. But she tells me she couldn't work out whether this was a positive comment (this is catching on; we're ahead of the curve) or a negative comment (that friend is getting old and having difficulty screening nuisance calls).

At one level, Truecall is a technology that does one job and seems to do it very well. At another level, it is a social device. The fact that them using Truecall was visible to a few of their friends and acquaintances seems to have made it unacceptable, even "embarrassing". I'm guessing it is preferable to them to be autonomous, to feel in control, and not to be seen to be using a call blocker, than to avoid nuisance calls. 
 
We all use technologies that we don’t fully understand. But we need to understand them well enough to feel in control, and it seems as if Truecall went beyond that for these elderly people and their equally elderly friends.

Truecall has had rave reviews, and it really does seem to do its job very well. So it was a surprise to me when Hanna told me about her and her parents' experiences. Maybe, even though I'm pretty sure that Hanna's parents are in the target market segment for Truecall, for something to work for Hanna's parents it would have to be even easier to use, even more transparent. I'm guessing it would have needed the following features:
  • everything accessible without obviously accessing the internet (so, visible on a dedicated display with the phone).
  • offering the 'phone book' capability so that they could more easily make calls.
  • having three call categories that are simultaneously enabled: trusted (come straight through); zapped (blocked, including all withheld numbers); and unknown (with a really easy way to move unknown numbers into trusted or zapped, whether before or after accepting the call).
I'm not sure that this is technically possible at the moment – or if it is, it might be prohibitively expensive to implement. But hopefully it will be possible in the near future. For me, the most important insight is that there are some very subtle emotional and social values that tip a technology from being something to engage with to being something that is rejected. In the uninvited guests video, the star of the show is technology savvy enough to subvert the best of intentions of his family and of the technology design; in Hanna's case, it seems that the only option for her parents was to reject the technology completely. We still have a lot to learn about how to design technology that is truly empowering.

Tuesday 26 January 2016

The lifecourse and digital health

I've just been away for the weekend with a group of people of varying ages. Over breakfast, I was chatting with Diane (names have been changed), who surmised that she was the oldest person there. I looked quizzical: surely she's in her 70s and Edna is in her late 80s? But no: apparently, Diane is 88, and thinks that Edna is only 86. Appearances can be deceptive. Diane has a few health niggles (eyesight not as good as it once was, hip occasionally twinges) but she remains fit and active, physically and mentally. I hope I will age as well.

Meanwhile, last week I was at an Alan Turing Institute workshop on "Opportunities and Challenges for Data Intensive Healthcare". The starting point was that data sciences have always played a key role in healthcare provision and deployment of preventative interventions, and that we need novel mathematical and computational techniques to exploit the vast quantities of health and lifestyle data that are now being generated. Better computation is needed to deliver better health management and healthcare at lower cost. And of course people also need to be much more engaged in their own care for care provision to be sustainable.

There was widespread agreement at the meeting that healthcare delivery is in crisis, with rising costs and rising demands, and that there is a need for radical restructuring and rethinking. For me, one of the more telling points made (by a clinician) is that significant resources are expended to little good effect in the interests of keeping people alive, when perhaps they should be left to die peacefully. The phrase used was "torturing people to death". I don't imagine many of us want to die in intensive care or in an operating theatre. Health professionals could use better data analytics to make more informed decisions about when "caring" means intervening and when it means stepping back and letting nature take its course.

In principle, better data, better data analysis, and better personalised health information should help us all to be better manage our own health and wellbeing – not taking over our lives, but enabling us to live our lives to the full. My father-in-law's favorite phrase was "I'd like a bucket full of health please". But there's no suggestion that any of us will (or wants to) live forever. At the meeting, someone suggested that we should be aiming for the "Duracell bunny" approach to life: live well, live long, die quickly. Of course, that won't be possible for everyone (and different people have different conceptions of what it means to "live well").

This presents a real challenge for digital health and for society: to re-think how each and every one of us lives the best life we can, supported by appropriate technology. There's a widespread view that "data saves lives"; let's also try to ensure that the saved lives are worth living!