MyPath: Investigating breast cancer patients’ use of personalized health information

Following a cancer diagnosis, patients must cope with numerous physical, emotional, and practical challenges. While health information exists to help patients learn how to manage these challenges, health information seeking often declines over time, recalling information is difficult, and limited time with healthcare providers can leave patients feeling uninformed about their illness. We designed MyPath to overcome these information access challenges. The mobile system offers personalized, dynamic, and trusted health information recommendations to help patients learn about and manage their cancer. Through a seven-month deployment study with breast cancer patients, we found that use of the application encouraged proactive health management behaviors, and identified factors that motivated technology adoption and abandonment. We discuss the implications of these results for facilitating use of mHealth tools by a rural patient population and the importance of scaling support to a large range of information needs. We use this work to demonstrate the value of personalized health information systems and to motivate future CSCW research developing personalized support systems for other health situations with complex information access models.