MyRoR : towards a story-inspired experience platform for lifestyle management scenarios

• Main Author: Pavel, Dana Mihaela
• Published: University of Essex 2013
• Subjects: 613.0285
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.605562

The lifestyle management area has become increasingly important during the past years due to the present as well as the expected impact on healthcare systems created by people living longer and with various chronic conditions. The work described in this thesis is motivated by an individual and societal drive towards empowering individuals with knowledge and technological means in order to increase self-awareness and lead to better self-management of personal wellbeing. However, lifestyles are complex and evolving, therefore when we build systems aimed at this area it is not enough to only focus on certain aspects of users' lives. Instead, we need to take a more holistic and long-term view of what is important and try to capture as many aspects of people's lives as possible. By doing this we can move from focusing on what happened towards why it happened and better support users in self-awareness, self-understanding, self-reflection and, ultimately, self-change. There is a lot of value in the information we generate through our daily interactions with computing devices. This thesis presents the work I performed towards creating MyRoR, an experience platform aimed at lifestyle management scenarios. At the core of this work is a novel story-inspired paradigm for correlating, abstracting, presenting and sharing multi-faceted user information through a dynamic and adaptive creation process. The main contributions of this work consist of: (1) a design framework and realisation of a novel story-inspired paradigm for modelling, organising and presenting information within a lifestyle management system; (2) a design framework, architecture and realisation of a multi-parametric experience platform for lifestyle management scenarios that can capture varied information, store it, model it, process it, correlate it and present it to an end user at various levels of abstraction; (3) valuable user-level in sights into experiencing such systems in order to create self-understanding and support self-reflection.