225688 Playing games and telling stories: Implications for technologies that address African American health disparities

Monday, November 8, 2010

Andrea Parker, BS , School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Rebecca E. Grinter, PhD , School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
  
BACKGROUND: Diet-related health problems such as diabetes and obesity disproportionately affect African Americans. OBJECTIVE: To address this issue, I designed two mobile phone software applications, OrderUP and EatWell, to help African Americans learn new strategies for healthy eating. OrderUP is a game in which players attempt to select the healthiest food choices for customers within a fictional community. EatWell is a system that allows users to record audio stories that describe how they have tried to eat healthfully within their local community, share those stories and listen to the stories of others in the community. METHOD: To better understand the potential impact of such systems, I conducted a comparative analysis of the design elements present in OrderUP and EatWell. I coupled this analysis with a comparison of results from in-depth qualitative fieldwork (interviews, system log analyses and user-generated content analysis) that I conducted to study the use of these systems. In these pilot studies, each system was used by 12 participants over a period of three to four weeks. RESULTS: My findings indicate the differences in how each system was able to provide users with personal and community-oriented health benefits (e.g. making changes to one's eating habits and feeling a sense of community empowerment). My analysis suggests features of these systems that helped and inhibited these benefits. Some of these features include 1) the personal nature of single-player game play versus the more public act of sharing and listening to stories, 2) the presence of a fictional versus a real community in the systems, 3) the frequency of interaction with the system and 4) the extent to which each system's design was able to engender conscious feelings of collectivism in participants. DISCUSSION: I use these results to present recommendations for the future of mobile health technology design for African Americans.

Learning Areas:
Communication and informatics
Diversity and culture

Learning Objectives:
1.Explain how casual games can be particularly useful for provoking personal reflection on health behaviors. 2.Identify how user-generated content sharing applications can be particularly useful for affecting health-related attitudes towards the community. 3.Describe design guidelines that will help researchers build future mobile applications that promote healthy eating in the African American community.

Keywords: African American, Information Technology

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am qualified to present because as a Ph.D. candidate in Human-Centered Computing, I have been conducting research on designing technologies to address African American health for over four years. Furthermore, I have a B.S. in Computer Science which provides further evidence of my background in technology design and development.
Any relevant financial relationships? Yes

Name of Organization Clinical/Research Area Type of relationship
Humana The Emerging Technology Applications group in Humana, a health insurance company My university received funding from Humana to conduct one of the projects described in this abstract. This funding did not pay for me, but did pay for a student assistant who helped me on the project.

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

Back to: 3368.3: Use of Informatics and Information Technology in Different Settings