Visualizing health : imagery as data for changing personal practice

Abstract

This thesis is about diabetics and their theories about their health practices. Daily decisions, such as eating and exercise habits, have clear consequences for a diabetic's health, yet many of them fail to change their behavior patterns despite knowing facts about the disease. I assumed that they might change their practices if the relationship between their actions and their blood glucose levels was made explicit. To do this, I introduced photography into diabetes diagnosis, asking people to collect images of their daily activities to complement their glucose monitoring. By combining quantitative glucose measurements with qualitative portraits of action, I hoped to make the relationship between physiology and behavior an object for discussion and reflection. More so, I hoped that diabetics who viewed these data would begin to develop new interpretations of their lifestyles that would ultimately lead to healthier activities. I will discuss studies conducted in diabetes education courses and a set of visualization tools that I designed to help people see correlations between glucose data and photographs of activity. The results of these studies suggest that photographing activities may have the potential to change the ways that diabetics understand and deal with their health.