Empathetic and Emotive Design: A Scoping Review Elizabeth M. BORYCKI a,1 , Ryan KLETKE a , Sandy WHITEHOUSE b , and Andre W. KUSHNIRUK a a School of Health Information Science, University of Victoria, Canada. b Tickit Health®, Canada ORCiD ID: Elizabeth M. Borycki https://orcid.org/ 0000-0003-0928-8867, Ryan Kletke https://orcid.org/ 0000-0002-0576-9789, Sandy Whitehouse https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5380-3796, Andre W. Kushniruk https://orcid.org/0000- 0002-2557-9288 Abstract. With the advent of the digital health era, there has emerged a new emphasis on collecting health information from patients and their families using technology platforms that are both empathetic and emotive in their design to meet the needs and situations of individuals, who are experiencing a health event or crisis. Digital empathy has emerged as an aspect of interactions between individuals and healthcare organizations especially in times of crises as more empathetic and emotive digital health platforms hold greater capacity to engage the user while collecting valuable health information that could be used to respond to the individuals’ needs. In this paper we report on the results of a scoping review used to derive an initial set of evidence-based empathetic or emotive design heuristics. Keywords. Empathy, emotive, design, heuristics, user interface, human-computer interaction, evidence-based 1. Introduction Empathetic and emotive interaction is an important element in the design of digital health tools. Empathetic and emotive interaction is focused on how users feel and react to technologies. Feeling and reactions affect user engagement with digital tools (e.g., mobile apps, websites, surveys) and can have significant impacts on the use of these tools. Such interactions attend to how emotion affect the user experience from first acquiring or using a software or a product through to its use and abandonment (or user disengagement). Empathetic or emotive interaction is present throughout a user’s journey with a software or product. It also deals with how users can become emotionally attached to a software or product [1,2]. Yet, we have few tools available in healthcare to collect information about individuals in a way that addresses their individual sensitivities and health needs while providing health information. This is an area of research that holds great promise for affording us the opportunity to collect information to support effective decision making by healthcare service managers while at the same collecting information from patients. In this paper we describe our work in conducting a 1 Corresponding Author: Elizabeth Borycki, Email: emb@uvic.ca. pHealth 2024 M. Giacomini et al. (Eds.) © 2024 The Authors. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/SHTI240063 85