The shape of health: A comparison of five alternative ways of visualizing personal health and wellbeing

TL;DR

This study compares five visualization methods for personal health data, demonstrating that effective visualizations improve understanding of health risks for non-experts, and highlights the need for further research in insight-based health data visualization.

Contribution

It introduces an insight-based evaluation methodology for health data visualizations and compares five different visualization approaches in a health context.

Findings

Effective visualizations enhance understanding of health risks for non-experts.

Insight-based methodology is promising but underexplored in health visualization.

Further research is needed to develop and validate visualization techniques.

Abstract

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.