Chronic Weather

A wearable that helps patients better communicate their pain status with non-patient workers or friends to facilitate communication and collaboration.

Xin Tong and Diane Gromala

What Weather?

  • Red Button Day: indicates that the wearer cannot be available or present.
  • Bad Weather: indicates that the wearer is in a bad physical condition.
  • Normal Weather: indicates a regular physical state.
  • Good Weather: indicates a good physical condition.
Problem. The uncertainty of pain experience can easily interrupt the lives of chronic pain patients and can inhibit communication and collaborations. We developed a wearable system with a real-time biofeedback display to monitor the patient’s varying states. The wearable system has visuals that only the wearer’s selected colleagues, friends or family members understand, but that strangers do not.Approaches. To better clarify chronic patients’ needs and the contexts, a mixed-method design combining single-case exploratory design and participatory design was adopted. A focus group was set up for the mix-method wearable design. The goal is to enable the selected people that the patient communicates with to develop better and more responsive strategies for the collaboration by getting visual updates on the patient’s variable physical condition.

Results. The exploratory design allowed us to gain better knowledge from the point-of-view of the patient and the people she worked with. Further, the interview results told us a tool need to be designed to enhance the collaboration. The wearable system solution was iterated 3 times to better satisfy the users’ needs. In the next phase, more CP patients and their conditions from various contexts will be involved in the design and iteration process.

Tong, X., Gromala, D., Choo, A., Salimi, M., Lee, J., (2015). “ ‘Weather’ Wearable System: a Design Exploration to Facilitate the Collaboration and Communication with Chronic Pain Patients,” peer-reviewed paper presented at the Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction: Access to Learning, Health and Well-Being section of HCI International. Peer-reviewed paper published in Proceedings of HCI International, vol. 9177, 383–393.

Gromala, D., Tong, X., & Choo, A. (2014). “A Wearable Pain ‘Weather’ System,” NCE-GRAND Annual Conference, Ottawa Canada, May 14-15, 2014.