Expressing Well-Being Online: Towards Self-Reflection and Social Awareness

Medicine, psychology and quality of life literature all point to the importance of not just asking ‘how are you?’, but assessing and being aware of self and others’ well-being. Social networking has been shown to have a variety of uses and benefits, but does not currently offer explicit expression of a well-being state. We developed and deployed Healthii, a social networking tool to convey well-being using a set of pre-defined discrete categories. We sought to understand how communicating this in a lightweight fashion may be used and valued. Using a hybrid methodology, over five weeks ten participants used the tool on Facebook, Twitter, or on the desktop, and in group meetings discussed the affect and effect of the tool, before a final individual survey. The trial showed that participants used and valued status expression for its support to convey state, and for self-reflection and group awareness. We discuss these findings as well as future opportunities for awareness visualization and automatic data integration.