Designing Culturally-informed Consumer Health IT: An Exploration and Proposed Integration of Contrasting Methodological Perspectives

As the locus of health care migrates from institutional to home- and community-based settings, designers face news challenges in developing consumer health information technology (health IT) to support patients and informal caregivers with their new self-care and self-management responsibilities. For such technologies to be appropriately designed, they must be aligned, in part, with the cultural context within which these consumers are embedded. Designing culturally-informed consumer health IT is challenging partly because of the tensions that exist between engineering and cultural anthropological approaches to studying the intersection of culture and technology. This paper proposes both a framework for conceptualizing these tensions and a potential embedded, sequential integration of these approaches to capitalize on the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses of each methodological perspective.