Value-sensitive design patterns for pervasive health care

Pervasive computing technologies offer solutions to many of the problems people face in aging. In doing so, they have the potential to support certain values such as human welfare. However, these solutions also have the potential to diminish human values such as trust, privacy and autonomy. Many of such value issues are recurrent, general problems that play out in specific application contexts. By accounting for values during the design of technology, designers would be in a better position to create technology that supports rather than hinders the values of its stakeholders. Yet, there are few methodical approaches to dealing with values in design. Moreover, knowledge on how specific value problems can be tackled is not captured systematically in a reusable way. We propose using Value Sensitive Design to analyze recurrent problems and identify affected stakeholders and their values. We use these analyses as a starting point for generating design patterns, or reusable solutions to recurrent problems, that explicitly include value considerations. We provide an initial set of value-sensitive design patterns as a proof-of-concept.