Wellness informatics: towards a definition and grand challenges.

The last decade has seen a large explosion of health-related human centered computing research and practice focused on wellness (e.g., good nutrition and exercise promotion) with the intention of helping people avoid needing medical care. And while Health Informatics may appear to be the obvious home for these activities, it is a discipline that has focused on the design, development, and evaluation of systems to process healthcare data and through that aid in patient treatment. Given the ubiquity of wellness systems we think its time to create a Wellness Informatics community. The goal of the workshop is to identify the themes and grand challenges for designing and evaluating Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) that help people stay well.