Design principles for health wearables

As wearables become increasingly prevalent, there is a concurrent and growing expectation that we use these devices to track and monitor our bodily states in order to be responsible "biocitizens." To mitigate this, some health, design, and usability scholars have advocated for greater patient control over health data. To support these efforts, this article offers a set of criteria for analyzing wearables, criteria that account for the handling of data and user connections via wearables as they relate to three priorities: accessibility, adaptability, and iterability. These are meant to support analyses that will clarify the ways wearables can more ethically serve end-users'---that is, patients' and wearers'---emerging needs, rather than primarily serving the intermediary goals of care delivery personnel and systems to monitor and manage patient behavior. To do this, this article addresses the usability of wearables as it relates to other critical care issues, such as "information integrity" and enabling patients to maintain their own health records and participate in shared decision making.