AUTHOR=Galliford Natasha , Yin Kathleen , Blandford Ann , Jung Joshua , Lau Annie Y. S. 

TITLE=Patient Work Personas of Type 2 Diabetes—A Data-Driven Approach to Persona Development and Validation

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Digital Health

VOLUME=Volume 4 - 2022

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/digital-health/articles/10.3389/fdgth.2022.838651

DOI=10.3389/fdgth.2022.838651

ISSN=2673-253X

ABSTRACT=Introduction: Many have argued that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to designing digital health is not optimal and that personalisation is essential to achieve targeted outcomes. Yet, most digital health practitioners struggle to identify which design aspect require personalisation. Personas are commonly used to communicate patient needs in consumer-oriented digital health design, however there is often a lack of transparency on development process and few attempts to assess their accuracy against the targeted population. In this study, we present a transparent approach to designing and validating personas, as well as identifying aspects that are sensitive to an individual’s context and may require personalisation.
Methods: A data-driven approach was used to develop and validate personas for people with Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), focusing on ‘patient work’, the combination of self-care tasks and the contextual factors influencing these tasks. Eight different personas of T2DM patient work were constructed based on data collected from 26 elderly Australian participants (median age = 72 years) via wearable camera footage, interviews, and self-reported diaries. These personas were validated for accuracy and perceived usefulness for design, both by the original participants and a younger (median age bracket = 45-54 years) independent sample of 131 T2DM patients from the United Kingdom and the United States.
Results: Both the original participants and the independent cohort reported the personas to be accurate representations of their patient work routines. For the independent cohort, 74% (97/131) indicated personas stratified to their levels of exercise and diet control were similar to their patient work routines. Findings from both cohorts highlight aspects that may require personalisation include daily routine, use of time, and social context.  
Conclusions: Personas made for a particular need can be very accurate if developed from real-life data. Our personas retained their accuracy even when tested against an independent cohort, demonstrating their generalisability. By using a data-driven approach to develop and validate personas, we have demonstrated it is possible to systematically identify which aspects of a persona are accurate and useful for design, and which aspects require more personalisation and tailoring, clarifying a design process often perceived as murky and non-transparent.