Wellness, Health, and Technology (WHAT)

Project Description:

Wearable technology is advertised to help individuals improve their health, but most current applications offer generic advice like walk 10,000 steps rather than insights tailored to an individual’s unique biological traits and lifestyles. The challenge is no longer just collecting data but translating that data into meaningful, personalized feedback that users can easily understand, act upon and incorporate into their daily lives.

In this project the students will explore the intersection of personal informatics and interaction design. They will utilize publicly available datasets to simulate “virtual users.” By treating individual participants in these datasets as distinct users, they will extract unique behavioral patterns (such as how a specific individual’s activity levels correlate with their sleep quality).

Their primary goal is to design and prototype a health tracking interface that communicates these personalized insights effectively. They will focus beyond simple data logging to create a “Personalized Insight Engine” that visualizes correlations, triggers, and trends. Over the course of two semesters they will explore the full user centered design process: exploratory data analysis, persona development, prototyping and usability evaluation.

Learning Objectives:

• Translate raw time series data into meaningful user-centered information.

• Prototype dynamic interfaces.

• Evaluate user experience.

Skills to learn:

• The project should require no specific skills beyond interest in health tracking. 

• Some background in data science would be helpful.