CO-OP - Diary for Patients and Caregivers

CO-OP is an interactive mobile health (mHealth) research app that utilizes visual illustrations of everyday illness experiences and user-generated media content to investigate how technology can support chronically ill patients and family caregivers' collaborative effort to track and co-create personally meaningful representations of everyday illnesses experiences in non-clinical settings.

The app will elicit and probe patients' and family caregivers' observations of treatment-induced illness experiences in relation to their everyday activities, and their design input—through a suite of media technology (e.g., photo, video, audio, digital canvas, etc.) readily available on their mobile device.

By leveraging collaboratively-generated media representations, CO-OP is expected to provide scaffolds for patients to engage with their everyday lived experience and, in turn, better articulate their illness experiences for the care provider.