Are You Going to Wear Your Wearable for Life? Designing for Long-Term Social Health

This paper presents a Model from which to develop design principles for products and services that promote long-term positive health and wellbeing. This Independency Model (IM) attempts to explain users’ varying levels of dependent behavior and ways they can change that behavior. As a journey toward self-reliance, these behaviors represent failures in sustainable change partly due to short-term thinking, loss of impulse control or lack of positive feedback. Design principles for products and services should differ with each profile in order to best help people evolve to tech independence. While persuasive technologies, such as wearable activity trackers, aim to help people induce and adhere to healthy behaviors by tracking their status, creating awareness and giving action plans, they do not necessarily offer any “exit” strategies. This new model en- courages products and services to be designed for people to “graduate” from the profile that is dependent on technologies, and internalize such independent healthy habits as their own.