Connected Wellness: Designing a Peer-Supported Mobile Platform to Promote Social and Emotional Wellbeing Among Older Adults

Abstract

Digital health technologies increasingly help people monitor physical activity, reflect on wellness data, and manage everyday health routines. However, many health-tracking systems emphasize individual metrics such as steps and progress indicators while overlooking older adults’ accessibility needs, social routines, and preferences for meaningful community engagement. Grounded in Self-Determination Theory, HealthMate investigates how mobile health-tracking technologies can support older adults’ autonomy, competence, and relatedness through accessible design, clear feedback, and socially supportive wellness features. This thesis investigated three research questions: • RQ1: What are the current challenges and benefits of physical activity tracking for older adults? • RQ2: How do older adults envision physical activity tracking could be enhanced through social connection, and what tradeoffs do they consider, such as privacy and accountability, when sharing progress or celebrating milestones? • RQ3: Do socially oriented health-tracking features increase older adults’ sense of relatedness, competence, and autonomy when engaging in wellness activities? It also examines older adults’ experiences with physical activity tracking, their preferences for peer-supported and community-based wellness tools, and the tradeoffs they consider when sharing progress or participating in socially oriented health features. Through interviews, co-design sessions, prototype development, and evaluation, the project identifies opportuni-ties for designing health technologies that are usable, motivating, trustworthy, and socially meaningful. HealthMate contributes new knowledge to personal health informatics and HCI for aging by showing that socially supportive health-tracking systems for older adults must balance motivation with autonomy, community participation with privacy, and health awareness with accessibility. The design insights from this work suggest that wellness technologies for older adults should move beyond metric-centered tracking toward systems that support everyday routines, trusted relationships, and user-controlled forms of engagement. These contributions inform the design of future health technologies that support healthy aging through both personal reflection and meaningful shared participation.