Designing for Intimate Wellbeing: Aidee, a Qualitative Approach To Urine Home Monitoring

Despite the widespread use of self-tracking technologies for promoting personal wellbeing, there is limited research on the monitoring of intimate data, particularly urine. To shed light on the design possibilities within this unexplored domain we designed Aidee, a prototype system composed of an app and interactive device that assists users in performing urine monitoring through qualitative data expression and ambient physicalization. To evaluate our prototype we conducted an exploratory between-subjects study involving 54 participants. Our findings indicate user acceptance for qualitative data expressions in the domain of personal wellbeing. Moreover, our study underscores that the combination of an app and interactive device helped people in consulting their urine analysis results with serenity and in experiencing feelings of support and companionship. With this paper we discuss the opportunities and challenges for designing monitoring experiences to promote intimate wellbeing by combining innovative ways of representation and interaction with data.