Double-Loop Health Technology: Enabling Socio-technical Design of Personal Health Technology in Clinical Practice

Personal health technology is rapidly emerging as a response to the challenges associated with significant increase in chronic noncommunicable diseases. The overall design paradigm behind most of these applications is to manually and automatically sample data from sensors and smartphones and use this to provide patients with an awareness of their illness and give recommendation for treatment, care, and healthy living.

Few of these systems are, however, designed to be part of a complex socio-technical care and treatment processes in existing healthcare systems and clinical pathways. In this chapter, we present a case of designing personal health technology for mental health, which is integrated into hospital-based treatment.

This system helps patients to manage their disease by tracking and correlation behavior and disease progression and provide feedback to them, while also deployed as part of a clinical outpatient treatment. Hence, clinicians are “in the loop” and can monitor and provide feedback to patients. The chapter outlines the case and discusses lessons learned from it with respect to the socio-technical design of personal health technologies to be embedded as part of clinical treatment.