The Use of Persona Towards Human-Centered Design in Health Field: Review of Types and Technologies

Persona is a user modeling technique used to provide insight into the audience and communicate their needs and behavior more convincingly and memorably. Persona has been adopted in several fields, including healthcare. This paper aims to review the use of Persona in the health field by providing an overview of the concept of Persona and examining and comparing the types of Persona in terms of the technologies used in the data collection and segmentation phases. The paper found that the data-driven Persona could overcome the limitations of the qualitative Persona, as it could cover a large sample size and take advantage of advanced analytical techniques such as machine learning. Furthermore, the use of social media as a data source recently gained researchers’ interest.