User Profiles and Personas in Consumer Health Technologies

Consumer health technologies (CHT) are considered important catalysts for what some are calling the "dawn of a new era - the age of the empowered health consumer". To develop effective systems, we must reach the level of personal connection to capture the essence of user groups and their issues. User profiles and personas can be used to help the development team to mentally visualize and communicate how intended users of CHT\´s will interact with the proposed design in a meaningful way. We use an action research approach to call attention to important health related characteristics for CHT user profiles and personas, provide persona and profile artifacts for chronic diabetics, and illustrate the process and benefit of these tools in requirements generation, design, and implementation planning.