Naturalistic Decision Making by Older Adults with Chronic Heart Failure: An Exploratory Study Using the Critical Incident Technique

摘要

Older adults with chronic heart failure (CHF) make daily decisions to manage their disease, with some ofthese decisions resulting in major health outcomes such as acute decompensation, hospitalization, anddeath. To understand how older adults with CHF make these decisions in their natural sociotechnicalsystem context, we analyzed data from critical incident technique interviews with 12 older adults with CHFand 6 (family or friend) support persons. We identified key decision-making barriers, strategies, anddistributed activity in stages of monitoring information or data, interpreting the information, and acting as aresult. Our findings contribute to the broader research literature on CHF self-care as a naturalisticphenomenon and can aid in the exploration of design requirements for the development of technologies andinterventions to assist in heart failure self-management.