Envisioning Mobile Data Visualization Libraries for Digital Health
arXiv:2604.24448
Abstract
Mobile health (mHealth) applications support health management through the collection and visualization of rich data, yet the quality of the visualizations varies widely. A key limitation lies in the challenge of effectively visualizing temporally dense, irregular, and context-dependent health data within the constrained mobile interfaces. We argue that this gap is partly driven by a lack of specialized developer tools. Existing libraries primarily target desktop or general-purpose mobile use, providing limited support for health-specific semantics such as normal ranges, thresholds, and goals. As a result, developers often resort to custom solutions that are inconsistent or hard to interpret. We therefore advocate for dedicated mobile visualization libraries tailored to personal health data and mobile contexts, and discuss key design considerations including intelligent defaults, built-in health annotations, and fluid interaction. Such libraries can lower the barrier to producing effective visualizations and make mHealth data easier for users to interpret.
8 pages, 4 figures. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication