Supporting face-to-face communication between clinicians and children with chronic headaches through a zoomable multi-touch app

Chronic headaches are one of the top five health problems for young children in the United States, negatively affecting their quality of life and learning opportunities. A clear understanding of children's headache characteristics is crucial for delivering appropriate treatment. However, current data collection methods were designed for adults often resulting in insufficient information. In this paper we present a novel method to help children communicate with health care providers and researchers about their headaches. It augments an existing child-centric method called Draw-and-Tell Conversation, which has already been shown to provide more actionable information from children than standard data collection methods. It does so by enabling children to draw their symptoms on a zoomable drawing application, giving them the ability to provide more details and context than on paper. We present a study conducted with nineteen children aged 7 to 12 suggesting that children provided more information about their headaches when using the zoomable drawing application than when drawing on paper. This study provides a rare example of a mobile device used to enhance face-to-face interactions and contributes evidence of a specific benefit of zoomable user interfaces.