Medical Selfies: Emotional Impacts and Practical Challenges

TL;DR

This study explores the emotional and practical challenges of patients taking medical selfies, highlighting usability issues, privacy concerns, and emotional impacts, and offers design recommendations for mobile health apps.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into patient experiences and emotional responses, and proposes design guidelines for improving mobile teledermatology applications.

Findings

Patients face difficulties with certain body parts.

Privacy concerns influence willingness to share images.

Taking selfies impacts emotional awareness and privacy perceptions.

Abstract

Medical images taken with mobile phones by patients, i.e. medical selfies, allow screening, monitoring and diagnosis of skin lesions. While mobile teledermatology can provide good diagnostic accuracy for skin tumours, there is little research about emotional and physical aspects when taking medical selfies of body parts. We conducted a survey with 100 participants and a qualitative study with twelve participants, in which they took images of eight body parts including intimate areas. Participants had difficulties taking medical selfies of their shoulder blades and buttocks. For the genitals, they prefer to visit a doctor rather than sending images. Taking the images triggered privacy concerns, memories of past experiences with body parts and raised awareness of the bodily medical state. We present recommendations for the design of mobile apps to address the usability and emotional impacts of taking medical selfies.