Supporting Chronic Headache Patients with Visual Analytics

Usually chronic headache patients are advised by their care providers to track their headache episodes in a paper or electronic diary. These diaries are primarily used for information extraction by clinicians to prepare proper treatment plan. Patients are generally dependent on clinician’s advices to improve their conditions. However, we hypothesize that with help of visual trends and analyses of chronic conditions as a form of personal informatics, patients will be empowered to manage their own conditions. We propose innovative analytics based interactive visualizations revealing hidden chronic patterns after analyzing limitations of previous work in this area and demonstrate how these visualizations can help patients by providing meaningful insights. We intend to carry out qualitative research involving real chronic patients to verify our hypothesis.