Publications by authors named "Julie Kientz"

Background: Following increases in smartphone access, more parents seek parenting advice through internet sources, including blogs, web-based forums, or mobile apps. However, identifying quality apps (ones that respond to the diverse experiences of families) for guidance on child development can be challenging.

Objective: This review of mobile health apps aimed to document the landscape, design, and content of apps in the United States available to parents as they promote their child's developmental health.

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Background: Recent increases in smartphone ownership among underserved populations have inspired researchers in medicine, computing, and health informatics to design and evaluate mobile health (mHealth) interventions, specifically for those supporting child development and growth. Although these interventions demonstrate possible effectiveness at larger scales, few of these interventions are evaluated to address racial disparities and health equity, which are known factors that affect relevance, uptake, and adherence in target populations.

Objective: In this study, we aimed to identify and document the current design and evaluation practices of mHealth technologies that promote early childhood health, with a specific focus on opportunities for those processes to address health disparities and health equity.

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Adolescent depression is common; however, over 60% of depressed adolescents do not receive mental health care. Digitally-delivered evidence-based psychosocial interventions (EBPIs) may provide an opportunity to improve access and engagement in mental health care. We present a case study that reviews lessons learned from using the Discover - Design - Build - Test (DDBT) model to create, develop, and evaluate a high-fidelity prototype of an app to deliver an EBPI for depression, behavioral activation (BA), on an Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) platform (referred to as ActivaTeen).

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Background: The school-age years, approximately ages 7 through 11, represent a natural transition when children begin assuming some responsibility for their asthma management. Previously, we designed a theoretically derived, tailored parent-child shared asthma management mobile health app prototype, Improving Asthma Care Together (IMPACT).

Objective: The purpose of this study was to use human-centered design (HCD) to iteratively refine IMPACT to optimize user experience and incorporate evidence-based longitudinal engagement strategies.

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Introduction: Asthma is an incurable, lifelong condition that places children at increased risk for exacerbation, hospitalisation and school absences. Most paediatric asthma interventions target parents alone and are overly prescriptive. Improving Asthma Care Together (IMPACT) is a novel shared management system comprised of a mobile health (mHealth) application, symptom watch and tailored health intervention that pairs parent and child together as an asthma management team.

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Background: Developers, designers, and researchers use rapid prototyping methods to project the adoption and acceptability of their health intervention technology (HIT) before the technology becomes mature enough to be deployed. Although these methods are useful for gathering feedback that advances the development of HITs, they rarely provide usable evidence that can contribute to our broader understanding of HITs.

Objective: In this research, we aim to develop and demonstrate a variation of vignette testing that supports developers and designers in evaluating early-stage HIT designs while generating usable evidence for the broader research community.

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Background: Many teenagers in the United States experience challenges with symptoms of depression, and they lack adequate resources for accessing in-person mental health care. Involving teens and clinicians in designing technologies that use evidence-based practices that reduce barriers to accessing mental health care is crucial. Interventions based on behavioral activation (BA) help teens understand the relationship between mood and activity, help them practice goal-directed behaviors to improve mood, and may be particularly well-suited to delivery via internet-based platforms.

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Many stakeholders can be involved in supporting a child's development, including parents, pediatricians, and educators. These stakeholders struggle to collaborate, and experts suggest that health information technology could improve their communication. Trust, based on perceptions of competence, benevolence, and integrity is fundamental to supporting information sharing, so information technologies should address trust between stakeholders.

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Background: Health risk behaviors are the most common sources of morbidity among adolescents. Adolescent health guidelines (Guidelines for Preventive Services by the AMA and Bright Futures by the Maternal Child Health Bureau) recommend screening and counseling, but the implementation is inconsistent.

Objective: This study aims to test the efficacy of electronic risk behavior screening with integrated patient-facing feedback on the delivery of adolescent-reported clinician counseling and risk behaviors over time.

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N-of-1 tools offer the potential to support people in monitoring health and identifying individualized health management strategies. We argue that elicitation of individualized goals and customization of tracking to support those goals are a critical yet under-studied and under-supported aspect of self-tracking. We review examples of self-tracking from across a range of chronic conditions and self-tracking designs (e.

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Parents and their school-age children can impact one another's sleep. Most sleep-tracking tools, however, are designed for adults and make it difficult for parents and children to track together. To examine how to design a family-centered sleep tracking tool, we designed DreamCatcher.

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Human-centered design (HCD) can be used to communicate research study findings to designers of health information technologies (HIT). We used the HCD approach to develop personas, scenarios, and design guidelines for designers with the aim that it would lead to new HIT designs that support the autonomy and health of older adults. The foundation of the personas, scenarios, and design guidelines was a study that focused on understanding how older adults manage their health information and the role that stakeholders play in that process.

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Advancements in evidence-based psychosocial interventions, digital technologies, and implementation strategies (i.e., health services research products) for youth mental health services have yet to yield significant improvement in public health outcomes.

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Teenagers have unique needs for mental wellbeing that can be supported by interactive technologies. Teens also have valuable input in the design of technology, so designers and researchers must seek new methods for involving them in the design process. We enrolled 23 unacquainted teenagers in an Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) study consisting of two private online groups.

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Background: As people increasingly receive personal health information through technology, there is increased importance for this information to be communicated with empathy and consideration for the patient's experience of consuming it. Although technology enables people to have more frequent and faster access to their health information, it could also cause unnecessary anxiety, distress, or confusion because of the sensitive and complex nature of the information and its potential to provide information that could be considered bad news.

Objective: The aim of this study was to uncover insights for the design of health information technologies that potentially communicate bad news about health such as the result of a diagnosis, increased risk for a chronic or terminal disease, or overall declining health.

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The rise of affordable sensors and apps has enabled people to monitor various health indicators via self-tracking. This trend encourages self-experimentation, a subset of self-tracking in which a person systematically explores potential causal relationships to try to answer questions about their health. Although recent research has investigated how to support the data collection necessary for self-experiments, less research has considered the best way to analyze data resulting from these self-experiments.

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Health information technology (HIT) could aid collaboration in the complex, interprofessional space of child development. Trust between stakeholders is necessary to support collaboration, but extant research provides little guidance on designing HIT that promotes trust within interprofessional collaborations. We analyzed interview data obtained from a heterogeneous group of stakeholders (n = 46) including parents and various service providers to explore trust relationships in the child development space.

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Despite public health efforts, individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) still have very high rates of tobacco smoking. Innovative approaches to reach this population are needed. These series of case studies aimed to descriptively evaluate the usability, user experience (UX), and user engagement (UE) of Learn to Quit (LTQ), an acceptance and commitment therapy smoking cessation app designed for people with SMI, and to compare it with an app designed for the general population, NCI (National Cancer Institute) QuitGuide (QG).

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Objective: Health information technology could provide valuable support for inter-professional collaboration to address complex health issues, but current HIT systems do not adequately support such collaboration. Existing theoretical research on supporting collaborative work can help inform the design of collaborative HIT systems. Using the example of supporting collaboration between child development service providers, we describe a deductive approach that leverages concepts from the literature and analyzes qualitative user-needs data to aid in collaborative system design.

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Background: Smoking rates in the United States have been reduced in the past decades to 15% of the general population. However, up to 88% of people with psychiatric symptoms still smoke, leading to high rates of disease and mortality. Therefore, there is a great need to develop smoking cessation interventions that have adequate levels of usability and can reach this population.

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Most health technologies are designed to support people who have already decided to work toward better health. Thus, there remains an opportunity to design technologies to help motivate people who have not yet decided to make a change. Understanding the experiences of people who have already started to make a health behavior change and how they made a pivotal decision can be useful in understanding how to design such tools.

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Many health care providers, with a variety of trainings, counsel clients on quitting smoking on a day-to-day basis. In their clinical practice, they draw from and adapt guidelines and research-based strategies to fit individual client situations and challenges. Designers of technologies to support quitting smoking can learn from these real world practices to create tools that better adapt to individual differences.

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People who are blind or low vision may have a harder time participating in exercise due to inaccessibility or lack of encouragement. To address this, we developed Eyes-Free Yoga using the Microsoft Kinect that acts as a yoga instructor and has personalized auditory feedback based on skeletal tracking. We conducted two different studies on two different versions of Eyes-Free Yoga: (1) a controlled study with 16 people who are blind or low vision to evaluate the feasibility of a proof-of-concept and (2) an 8-week in-home deployment study with 4 people who are blind or low vision, with a fully functioning exergame containing four full workouts and motivational techniques.

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We consider why and how women track their menstrual cycles, examining their experiences to uncover design opportunities and extend the field's understanding of personal informatics tools. To understand menstrual cycle tracking practices, we collected and analyzed data from three sources: 2,000 reviews of popular menstrual tracking apps, a survey of 687 people, and follow-up interviews with 12 survey respondents. We find that women track their menstrual cycle for varied reasons that include remembering and predicting their period as well as informing conversations with healthcare providers.

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