Rapid innovations in electronic healthcare and behavior tracking systems are challenging health coaches (dietitians, personal trainers, etc.) to rethink their traditional roles and healthcare practices. At the same time, many current e-coaching systems have been developed without explicitly incorporating the healthcare professionals' perspective into the design process. In the current paper, we present three consecutive qualitative studies, starting from the health coach's perspective on successful coaching, progressively zooming in on the potential role and impact of technology as part of the coaching process. Our main finding is that coaches are concerned that introducing technology in the coaching process puts too much emphasis on behavioral information, lowering the attention for the client's lived experience, while understanding those experiences is key for successful coaching. We summarize our insights in a multi-channel communication model and draw implications for the design of supporting technology in health coaching.

This paper presents a designerly exploration of the potential values of parent-tracked baby data in interactions between parents and healthcare professionals (HCPs). Where previous work has used parent-tracked data as part of the solution to a problem, we contribute by starting our design exploration from data, using it as creative material in our design process. As we intend to work towards a system that could be viable across different levels of care, we invited three different types of HCPs and five families with newborns, for a five-week situated design exploration. Facilitated by an open and dynamic data collection toolkit, parents and HCPs could together decide what data to collect. In a continuous dialogue, they reflected on the relevance of that data in their interaction. Based on this, we continuously and remotely developed two concepts.