UBC Invites Health Design Lab to Collaborate on First Culturally-Specific Prescriptive Exercise App
Compare the number of healthy habits you’ve tried to form, like getting regular exercise, to the number you’ve formed successfully. If you’re like most of us, that ratio is lower than you’d prefer.
The truth is that even when our physicians prescribe us helpful exercises proven to treat or prevent chronic illnesses to which we are predisposed, like diabetes or cardiovascular disease, we still struggle to create that new healthy regime, let alone maintain it long-term.
So how might we change “self-healthcare” odds in our favour?
Research partially funded by GRAND (Graphics, Animation and New Media) together with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) reveals that the answer to this question may, in actuality, have two parts – both of which Emily Carr University Research is exploring.
Emily Carr’s Health Design Lab Director, Jonathan Aitken, was invited by Dr. Darren Warburton of UBC to collaborate in their development of an interactive exercise prescription tool with mutual benefits for us as patients, for the doctors who treat us, and for researchers whose clinical trials using the app will support increased understanding of the effect that physical activity has on our health. Read the full story in Part 1: Putting health expertise into service for you below.
Aboriginal Gathering Place, Emily Carr UniversityNext, the Universities expanded their work and their ECU-UBC research team to include two fourth year design students, Gina Hetland and Stacey Hagel, both of Emily Carr University. Applying user-centric design research, their grad project became the development of a prescriptive exercise app – their objective was to increase its relevance to a specific community by making it more culturally specific.
A “first of its kind” in the design field, the research team engaged cultural knowledge and perspectives from the collective Aboriginal student communities of both Universities. They also drew on the leadership and academic expertise of three key individuals from Emily Carr’s Aboriginal Gathering Place: Brenda Crabtree, Aboriginal Program Manager, Student Services + Registrar; Mimi Gellman, Associate Professor, Faculty of Culture + Community; and Luke Parnell, Sessional Faculty, Carver and graduate of Emily Carr University’s Master of Applied Arts program. Read the full story in Part 2: Health Design for Community and Cultural Relevance below.
Emily Carr University looks forward to more collaborations and opportunities through which to further apply this experience from a larger research perspective, exploring culturally-specific design as it relates to the field of healthcare. By designing specifically for smaller demographics, Health Design Lab hopes to help grow engagement, and therefore well-being, of more devoted users.
For more information on these projects, and to learn about Health Design Lab go to research.ecuad.ca.