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With the increasing adoption of body tracking technology, users are able to collect bio-data which designers struggle to make legible or actionable. This work focused on increasing this technology-mediated bodily understanding through exploring the material properties of the body rhythms that govern the sleep behaviours being tracked.Building from a workshop with non-normative sleepers, we reframe sleep tracking to be about understanding and manipulating body rhythms. We explore these rhythms through the RtD process of designing the Awari alertness-forecast and scheduling application in four iterations. This resulted in three non-exclusive categories of rhythmic influence: Slow & Cyclical, Pressure & Release, and Anchored. Through a better understanding of how they interact, their inertia, and their material properties for interaction we encourage the design of technology to shape, and be shaped, by the complex rhythms of life. We discuss ways in which this can democratise medical-models, and make actionable complex bodily processes.

Complicating the notion that personal surveillance is always ubiquitous and pervasive, this article investigates the macro-, meso-, and microlevel “gaps” that confound the study of self-tr...

Personal informatics tools can help users self-reflect on their experiences. When reflective thought occurs, it sometimes leads to negative thought and emotion cycles. To help explain these cycles, we draw from Psychology to introduce the concept of rumination—anxious, perseverative cognition focused on negative aspects of the self—as a result of engaging with personal data. Rumination is an important concept for the Human Computer Interaction community because it can negatively affect users’ well-being and lead to maladaptive use. Thus, preventing and mitigating rumination is beneficial. In this conceptual paper, we differentiate reflection from rumination. We also explain how self-tracking technologies may inadvertently lead to rumination and the implications this has for design. Our goal is to expand self-tracking research by discussing these negative cycles and encourage researchers to consider rumination when studying, designing, and promoting tools to prevent adverse unintended consequences among users.

Recent years have seen a growth in the spread of digital technologies for self-tracking and personal informatics. Smartphones‚ in particular, stand out as being an ideal self-tracking technology that permits both active logging (via self-reports) and passive tracking of information (via phone logs and mobile sensors). In this chapter, we present the results of a literature review of smartphone-based personal informatics studies across three different disciplinary databases (computer science, psychology, and communication). In doing so, we propose a conceptual framework for organizing the smartphone-based personal informatics literature. Our framework situates self-tracking studies based on their substantive focus across two domains: (1) the measurement domain (whether the study uses subjective or objective data) and (2) the outcome of interest domain (whether the study aims to promote insight or change in physical and/or mental characteristics). We use this framework to identify and discuss research trends and gaps in the literature. For example, most research has been concentrated on tracking of objective measurements to change either physical or mental characteristics, while less research used subjective measures to study a physical outcome of interest. We conclude by pointing to promising future directions for research on self-tracking and personal informatics and emphasize the need for a greater appreciation of individual differences in future self-tracking research.

Latest work regarding personal informatics, gamification, and feedback has suggested that visualizing behavioural data for daily reflection should consider dynamic representations in metaphors and ...

Self-monitoring devices are becoming increasingly popular in the support of physical activity experiences. These devices mostly represent on-screen data using numbers and graphs and in doing so, they may miss multi-sensorial methods for engaging with data. Embracing the opportunity for pleasurable interactions with one's own data through the use of different materials and digital fabrication technology, we designed and studied three systems that turn this data into 3D-printed plastic artifacts, sports drinks, and 3D-printed chocolate treats. We utilize the insights gained from associated studies, related literature, and our experiences in designing these systems to develop a conceptual framework, “ Shelfie. ” The “ Shelfie ” framework has 13 cards that convey key themes for creating material representations of physical activity data. Through this framework, we present a conceptual understanding of relationships between material representation and physical activity data and contribute guidelines to the design of meaningful material representations of physical activity data.

Self-monitoring is considered a promising tool for self-management in clinical mental health, such as for coping with excessive stress. Detecting debilitating stress before the onset of a psychopathology is becoming more of interest both for practitioners and the scientific community. However, the development of mental well-being technology focusing on stress is disrupted by the complexity of accurately measuring stress, as no clear idea exists on the construct and how it should be measured. There is also limited knowledge on the perception of perceived quality of the outcomes from a stress algorithm and the variety in its behavioural consequences. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the impact of such digital self-monitoring technology for stress. It applies a qualitative method, by using semi-structured interviews. The most important resulting themes to users of this application were data-interpretation and a request for transparency. Results indicated that the majority of the predictions of the stress algorithm were not in line with the expectations of the users. The implications of these findings reveal how stress algorithms can make participants doubt their own self judgment on assessing their daily stress levels.

With the widespread use of fitness trackers, predicting the future of individuals’ health is becoming easier. However, little is known about how presenting a prediction of an individual's future impacts one's behavior. In this study, we targeted walking behavior and aimed to clarify the impact of presenting a prediction of the number of steps on one's behavior. We conducted a five-week experiment with 36 participants using the application “StepUp Forecast”, which presents prediction on the basis of past lifelogs. We found that self-efficacy and the number of steps increased significantly when the predictions were presented compared with when only records of steps were shown. This was because people were motivated to exceed the predicted value. Furthermore, when additional steps were presented along with the step prediction, neither self-efficacy nor the number of steps increased. Our findings suggest that the prediction should be an achievable value in which the user can exceed, and that a positive feedback loop could be possible by enhancing self-efficacy through the experience of achievement.

Although self-tracking offers potential for a more complete, accurate, and longer-term understanding of personal health, many people struggle with or fail to achieve their goals for health-related self-tracking. This paper investigates how to address challenges that result from current self-tracking tools leaving a person's goals for their data unstated and lacking explicit support. We examine supporting people and health providers in expressing and pursuing their tracking-related goals via goal-directed self-tracking, a novel method to represent relationships between tracking goals and underlying data. Informed by a reanalysis of data from a prior study of migraine tracking goals, we created a paper prototype to explore whether and how goal-directed self-tracking could address current disconnects between the goals people have for data in their chronic condition management and the tools they use to support such goals. We examined this prototype in interviews with 14 people with migraine and 5 health providers. Our findings indicate the potential for scaffolding goal-directed self-tracking to: 1) elicit different types and hierarchies of management and tracking goals; 2) help people prepare for all stages of self-tracking towards a specific goal; and 3) contribute additional expertise in patient-provider collaboration. Based on our findings, we present implications for the design of tools that explicitly represent and support an individual's specific self-tracking goals.

People’s data practices and their supporting personal informatics are imbued with a wide range of concepts of value that are central to their data imaginaries. They inform how individuals adopt particular products and services. This elusiveness of value creates a challenge for designers to gauge users’ value preferences, which are personal, contextual and abstract. We propose deliberation as a process to operationalise design for elicitation, reflection and value formation, using Live Action Role Play (LARP). The paper demonstrates how our deliberative LARP precipitates the otherwise ethereal data values to unfold in a social setting. We argue that engaging people in reflecting on and playing out their own value formation offers designers more powerful insights to address complex challenges of data-driven societies. We report on our findings that agency and negotiability are key to transcend the politics of preferences in data practices and thus enhance acceptability.

Time management planning (TMP) is a practice where people plan what they intend to accomplish and when in a given day. The literature indicates behaviors associated with TMP, but not how people specifically engage in them or how technology is involved. We examined TMP practices of 19 graduate students, noting their methods and how they engage with tools. Students utilized different combinations of TMP behaviors, both in comparison to each other and within their own experiences. We then asked them to plan following specific guidelines over five days. Participants implemented these guidelines in unique ways using unstructured tools (paper, notes applications). Together, these findings suggest that to be useful, TMP software must not impose a specific structure. We demonstrate opportunities to incorporate these findings through the design of a flexible mobile application based on notes applications to facilitate planning while encouraging, but not requiring, the use of TMP behaviors.

In a world where data is everywhere, designers are working to find ways in which to design with this intangible and invisible new material. Data-enabled design is becoming an increasingly accepted practice to use for user research around data and for the development of data products and systems. As a methodology, it offers designers and researchers the possibility to rapidly react to user insights and to iterate even during product or system deployment. However, as the practice is reactive, it is more difficult to consider long-term consequences while performing data-enabled studies. In my PhD research, I investigate different ways to design for the future of data practices, by making futuring practices part of data-enabled design processes. My research is situated in a clinical context, where the use of more personal informatics is up and coming but where also the long-term user well-being is a primary concern.

Internet memes are (multi)media pieces, found all across the world-wide-web. Often disposing of a humorous component, they express and reflect on all kinds of local and global phenomena. Within our work, we explore how people can use internet memes to express and reflect on themselves. We built MEMEory, a mobile meme journaling app. We evaluated the prospect of meme journaling, nicknamed ”memeing”, alongside a written diary in a 2-week field study with 31 participants. Opposed to more neutral chronicle-style text entries, our results suggest that participants used memes to express specific single, rather negative events and emotions throughout the day. When reflecting on daily events, the contained emotional and often humorous connotation of memes helped participants view negative events as more positive in retrospect. Although more difficult, memeing was perceived as significantly more motivating and enjoyable. Qualitative insights show that memeing can present a fun, engaging, expressive and memorable journaling experience.

Journaling of consumed foods through digital devices is a popular self-tracking strategy for weight loss and eating mindfulness. Research has explored modalities, like photos and open-ended text and voice descriptions, to make journaling less burdensome and more descriptive than traditional barcode and database searches. However, less is known about how people prefer to journal foods when less constrained by limitations of databases, natural language processing, and image recognition. We deployed a food journal prototype supporting varied devices and input modalities, which 15 participants used to journal 1008 food logs over two weeks. Participants had diverse strategies for indicating what and how much they ate, varying from ambiguous foods to specifying varieties and using different measurements for clarifying amount. Some strategies were interpretable by natural language food identification and image classification services, while others point to open research questions. We finally discuss opportunities for accounting for variance in food journaling.

Persuasive features are often used in food journaling apps to help people reach various personal goals. Our understanding of persuasive design in food journaling apps has primarily been built from studying and designing apps in Western contexts. However, varied cultural perceptions around journaling goals, such as healthy eating and weight management, suggest that the design of persuasive features may differ across cultures. We therefore investigate how culture influences the use of persuasive techniques in Chinese food journaling apps and consequently people's journaling experiences. Through reviewing features of Chinese apps and interviewing people who have used them, we find that some Chinese apps heavily emphasize body shape, and people's motivations for journaling and desires for journaling apps similarly focus more on body shape than diet. We discuss tensions and opportunities for food journaling apps which align with or account for cultural norms while challenging unhealthy or problematic aspects of them.

Research in personal informatics (PI) calls for systems to sup- port social forms of tracking, raising questions about how privacy can and should support intentionally sharing sensitive health information. We focus on the case of personal data related to the self-tracking of bipolar disorder (BD) in order to explore the ways in which disclosure activities intersect with other privacy experiences. While research in HCI of- ten discusses privacy as a disclosure activity, this does not reflect the ways in which privacy can be passively experienced. In this paper we broaden conceptions of privacy by defining transparency experiences and contributing factors in contrast to disclosure activities and preferences. Next, we ground this theoretical move in empirical analysis of personal narratives shared by people managing BD. We discuss the resulting emer- gent model of transparency in terms of implications for the design of socially-enabled PI systems. CAUTION: This paper contains references to experiences of mental illness, including self-harm, depression, suicidal ideation, etc.

As self-tracking has evolved from a niche practice to a mass-market phenomenon, it has become possible to track a broad range of activities and vital parameters over years and decades. This creates both new opportunities for long term research and also illustrates some challenges associated with longitudinal research. We establish characteristics of very long-term tracking, based on previous work from diverse areas of Ubicomp, HCI, and health informatics. We identify differences between long- and short-term tracking, and discuss consequences on the tracking process. A model for long-term tracking integrates the specific characteristics and facilitates identifying viewpoints of tracking. Finally, a research agenda suggests major topics for future work, including respecting gaps in data and incorporating secondary data sources.

Food journaling is important for individuals and nutrition researchers. Food journaling is very tedious and challenging to do accurately. This thesis explores how to improve this based on both simple and detailed food journaling. These represent two extremes in terms of user effort and detail in the logging. To tackle the challenge of detailed food journaling, we designed a mobile food logging app, Eat and Track (EaT). This multi-disciplinary research was in conjunction with a public health research project where young adults used EaT to track their food intake. The core research challenge was to explore how to support searching for food in a large food database (6,274 foods) on a small mobile phone screen. This work began with the design of an innovative approach to the food search, based on the 100 most frequently eaten foods. This design was refined in formative studies. Then we designed a new approach for the systematic study of the use, usability and effectiveness of EaT, especially its search interface. This was based on collaboration with nutritionists in a large field trial (N=1,027). The key contributions are the design and evaluation of the Search-Accelerator to facilitate searching for food in a large food database and our systematic evaluation process. To tackle the challenges of simple journaling, we explored the use of the mobile phone lock screen and designed the ultra-lite lock screen logger, Food InTake logger (FIT), for tracking vegetable intake. Our 4-week field study (N=19) revealed that it is quick and easy to use. The study led to a key conceptual contribution in the definition of the notion of lock screen ambience. The study demonstrated that most people found FIT to be an ambient reminder to eat vegetables and track vegetable intake. The key contributions are the definition of lock screen ambience to help people maintain awareness of an important goal, and the exploration of the lock screen to help people to do simple food logging

The research community on the study and design of systems for personal informatics has grown over the past decade. To take stock of what the topics the field has studied and methods the field has used, we map and label 523 publications from ACM's library, IEEE Xplore, and PubMed. We surface that the literature has focused on studying and designing for health and wellness domains, an emphasis on understanding and overcoming barriers to data collection and reflection, and progressively fewer contributions involving artifacts being made. Our mapping review suggests directions future research could explore, such as identifying and resolving barriers to tracking stages beyond collection and reflection, engaging more with domain experts, and further discussing the privacy and ethical concerns around tracked data.

While sleep health is increasingly becoming important to many people, it is challenging to maintain good sleep quality. Because sleep can be affected by many internal and external factors, which may differ among individuals, it is therefore important to support people to explore and reflect on what factors truly affect their sleep as most existing sleep self-tracking tools mainly focus on showing how individuals slept. In this study, we developed two design probes to support users to investigate personal sleep factors through self-experimenting and reflection. The tangible probe enables individuals to track three personal sleep factors flexibly, while the digital visualization one provides weekly reports of their sleep together with the three tracked factors. We conducted a preliminary field study with five participants over four weeks. The results show that our designs could support users to investigate their personal concerned sleep factors in terms of the causal relationship with the subjective sleep quality.

Geriatric depression (GD) entails unique challenges that result from the complex interplay of issues specific to either the aging or depressed, such as cognitive error and health anxiety. We conducted an interview study to assess issues encountered by depressed older adults in communication and perception of their conditions, and explore how personal tracking could mitigate such issues. Our results identify how patients? behavior and communication of their condition with others are impacted by their biases, informing how GD-specialized monitoring can be designed to facilitate recovery.

Self-trackers reflect on their personal data to understand their behaviour and plan accordingly. Often, this reflection involves uncertainty, which can affect decision-making. To better understand the role of uncertainty, we conducted an interview study to comprehend how uncertainty influences reflection and the resulting actions. Our findings suggest that, in addition to the conventional role of uncertainty as a barrier, uncertainty also manifests as a trigger and facilitator to reflection. We discuss functionalities to alleviate the negative effects of uncertainty (e.g. incorporating users' expectations in self-tracking), and leverage its positive effects through activity reconstruction mechanisms.

Continuous tracking of information is critical for meaningful self-reflection and self-monitoring, but people often forget to log their information in tracking devices. Research indicates that tracking reminders can successfully remind people to log their information, yet, little is known about what make reminders (in)effective. We extend prior work by identifying message attributes in tracking reminders that people find most effective in motivating them to log. To address this overarching research goal, we conducted two online studies where participants evaluated and designed tracking reminders. In Study 1, participants (N = 135) evaluated a set of tracking reminders for different behaviors (e.g., breakfast, weight) from popular fitness tracking apps on several dimensions such as the persuasiveness of each reminder. We found that participants liked reminders that were straightforward, encouraging, goal specific, and positive. In Study 2, participants (N = 100) designed a reminder for different behaviors (i.e., breakfast, lunch, dinner, weight, and exercise) that would successfully motivate them to log. Through thematic analysis of participants' self-created reminders, we again found prominent message attributes that had emerged in Study 1 and also uncovered novel message attributes, including personalization, humor, and friend-like. Design implications are discussed in light of our findings.

New parents often experience significant stress as they take on new roles and responsibilities. Stress management and mental wellbeing are two areas in which personal informatics (PI) research has gained attention, and there is an opportunity to investigate how parenting stress can be mitigated through PI practices. In this paper, we present the results of a co-designed technology probe study through which we deployed individualized self-trackers with new parents. We investigate the stress management topics new parents are interested in tracking and how — and with what goals---they engage in self-directed PI practices. Our findings indicate that PI practices can potentially enable parents to: re-discover positive aspects of their everyday lives; identify better-suited stress management strategies; and facilitate spousal communication about shared responsibilities. We discuss how self-tracking experiences for the mental wellness of parents can be better designed.

Critical flicker frequency (CFF) is the minimum frequency at which a flickering light source appears fused to an observer. Measuring CFF can support early diagnosis of minimal hepatic encephalopathy (MHE), a condition affecting up to 80% of people with cirrhosis of the liver. However, adoption of CFF measurement in clinical practice has been hampered by the cost of a device for measuring CFF and the need for specialized training to administer the test. This paper presents Beacon, a portable, inexpensive device that enables people to measure their own critical flicker frequency. We adopt a mixed-methods approach to informing and evaluating the design of and potential opportunities for Beacon. We first report on a two-part formative study with 10 participants to evaluate the choice of certain parameters in the design of Beacon. We then report on a study of 41 healthy adults ranging from 18 to 99 years of age, finding that Beacon performs on par with Lafayette Flicker Fusion System, an established medical device, achieving a pearson correlation coefficient of 0.88. We finally report on a focus group with five hepatoligists who work with patients with cirrhosis of the liver, using our initial prototype development to examine their perspectives on potential opportunities and challenges in adoption of a device like Beacon. We discuss Beacon as an exploration of reframing critical flicker frequency measurement from a clinical screening tool into a self-administered self-tracking measure, thereby drawing upon and contributing to research in the health and personal informatics.

Technological advances in wearable computing are changing the sports domain. A variety of Personal Informatics (PI) tools are starting to provide support and improve athletes’ performance in many sports. In this article, we interviewed 20 amateur and elite athletes of different disciplines, using an array of PI devices, to explore how sports, as well as athletes’ experience, are affected by such instruments. We discovered that amateur athletes present different patterns of usage compared to elite ones. Moreover, we found that elite athletes make sense of their data by exploiting the knowledge they have about their own body and sports practice. We then proposed four considerations for design that we believe should be explored in the future, to reflect on how self-tracking is changing our perspective on sports, and, by and large, on our everyday life.

Thanks to the advancements in ubiquitous and wearable technologies, Personal Informatics (PI) systems can now reach a larger audience of users. However, it is not still clear whether this kind of t...

Baby wearable technologies are becoming increasingly popular, particularly in early infancy. However, little research has been conducted to investigate how baby wearable technologies are adopted and used in parenting. This paper presents a two-week in-depth situated study with six mothers in their homes consisting of contextual entry and exit interviews, video recordings of "out-of-box" experiences, and a diary study. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis, participants' use and expectations of the baby wearable technology were examined. Use of the device directly impacted upon parents' knowledge production and anxiety, and influenced the perceived physicality and social factors of parenting. We frame these findings around sociological norms of the vulnerable child and responsible mother, as well as the notion of "lived informatics", where individuals' interaction with the technology influenced the perception, use and impact of the baby wearable on everyday parenting practices and familial relationships.

Over the last decade, the idea of a “quantified self” has become increasingly well-known (Swan, 2013). The main premise is to collect and reflect on data about oneself in order to gain new insights...

Self-experiments allow people to investigate their own individual outcomes from behavior change, often with the aid of personal tracking devices. The challenge is to design scientifically valid self-experiments that can reach conclusive results. In this paper, we aim to understand how novices run self-experiments when they are provided with a structured lesson in experimental design. We conducted a study on self-experimentation with two cohorts of students, where a total of 34 students performed a self-experiment of their choice. In the first cohort, students were given only two restrictions: a specific number of variables to track and a set duration for the study. The findings from this cohort helped us generate concrete guidelines for running a self-experiment, and use them as the format for the next cohort. A second cohort of students used these guidelines to conduct their own self-experiments in a more structured manner. Based on the findings from both cohorts, we propose a set of guidelines for running successful self-experiments that address the pitfalls encountered by students in the study, such as inadequate study design and analysis methods. We also discuss broader implications for future self-experimenters and designers of tools for self-experimentation.

Human–computer interaction research on personal informatics in health care has focused on systems that aim to support patient empowerment and enable better health outcomes with data monitoring and ...

Although Personal Informatics stresses the importance of “self”-awareness and “self”-knowledge in collecting personal data, a description of the “self,” to which all these knowledge endeavors are addressed, is missing in the current debate. In this article we first review how the different theoretical assumptions that currently inform the design of Personal Informatics tools fail to convey a convincing image of the self, which ought to be quantified by these technologies. We then move on to the outline of a theory of the self that may ground the current discourse in Personal Informatics. Building on this theoretical framework, we propose a set of design guidelines as its implications, which may drive the design of future self-tracking technologies. Finally, we outline a research agenda, organized around such guidelines, in the form of research questions to be addressed in the future.

Quantified-self application is widely used in sports and health management; the type and amount of data that can be fed back to the user are growing rapidly. However, only a few studies discussed the social attributes of quantified-self data, especially in the context of cycling. In this study, we present “SocialBike,” a digital augmented bicycle that aims to increase cyclists’ motivation and social relatedness in physical activity by showing their quantified-self data to each other. To evaluate the concept through a rigorous control experiment, we built a cycling simulation system to simulate a realistic cycling experience with SocialBike. A within-subjects experiment was conducted through the cycling simulation system with 20 participants. Quantitative data were collected with the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) and data recorded by the simulation system; qualitative data were collected through user interviews. The result showed that SocialBike increase cyclists’ intrinsic motivation, perceived competence, and social relatedness in physical activity.

Recent growth in the use of consumer self-tracking technologies has attracted attention from patients and healthcare providers alike, while researchers have begun to explore its value in the context of chronic health conditions. Sensemaking challenges faced by patients and clinicians have shifted the focus of self-tracking studies towards co-interpretation. Yet workflow constraints and conflicting interests remain barriers to the integration of self-tracking data into clinical conversations. My research aims to address these issues with designs of interactive systems that support the collaborative use of patient self-tracking data.

Self-tracking can help people understand their medical condition and the factors that influence their symptoms. However, it is unclear how tracking technologies should be tailored to help people cope with the progression of a degenerative disease. To understand how smartphone apps and other tracking technologies can support people in coping with an incurable illness, we interviewed both people with Parkinson's Disease (n=17) and care partners (n=6) who help people with Parkinson's manage their lives. We describe how symptom trackers can help people identify and solve problems to improve their quality of life, the role symptom trackers can play in helping people combat their own tendencies towards avoidance and denial, and the complex role of care partners in defining and tracking ambiguous symptoms. Our findings yield insights that can guide the design of tracking technologies to help people with Parkinson's Disease accept and plan for their condition.

Though some work has looked at the implementation of personal informatics tools with youth and in schools, the approach has been prescriptive; students are pushed toward behaviour change intervention or otherwise use the data for prescribed learning in a particular curriculum area. This has left a gap around how young people may themselves choose to use personal informatics tools in ways relevant to their own concerns. We gave workshops on personal informatics to 13 adolescents at two secondary schools in London, UK. We asked them to use a commercial personal informatics app to track something they chose that they thought might impact their learning. Our participants proved competent and versatile users of personal informatics tools. They tracked their feelings, tech activity, physical activity, and sleep with many using the process as a system for understanding and validating aspects of their own lives, rather than changing them.

A 'data-driven life' has become an established feature of present and future technological visions. This dissertation interrogates the human experience of a data-driven life, by conceptualising, investigating, and speculating about personal informatics tools as new technologies of memory. I argue that the prevalence of quantified data and metrics is creating fundamentally new and distinct records of everyday life: a 'quantified past'. To address this, I conducted qualitative and idiographic fieldwork -- with long-term self-trackers, and subsequently with users of 'smart journals' -- to investigate how this data-driven record mediates the experience of remembering. Further, I undertook a speculative and design-led inquiry to explore the context of a 'quantified wedding'. Adopting a context where remembering is centrally valued, this Research through Design project demonstrated opportunities for the design of data-driven tools for remembering. Crucially, while speculative, this project maintained a central focus on individual experience, and introduced an innovative methodological approach 'Speculative Enactments' for engaging participants meaningfully in speculative inquiry.

This paper introduces an emerging typology of the 'absences' that confound the study of self-tracking. A review of the literature, and the ongoing work of the authors on the long-term value of self-tracking data, is used as a resource to develop descriptions of levels and types of ?gaps' that emerge as part of the activities, behaviors, technologies, and data practices of self-tracking. Such gaps are shown to be both common and insightful, highlighting the economic, social, behavioral, and psychological layers that undergird self-tracking.

Background The tracking, or logging, of food intake and physical activity is increasing among people, and as a result there is increasing evidence of a link to improvement in health and well-being. Crucial to the effective and safe use of logging is a user’s information literacy. Objective The aim of this study was to analyze food and activity tracking from an information literacy perspective. Methods An online survey was distributed to three communities via parkrun, diabetes.co.uk and the Irritable Bowel Syndrome Network. Results The data showed that there were clear differences in the logging practices of the members of the three different communities, as well as differences in motivations for tracking and the extent of sharing of said tracked data. Respondents showed a good understanding of the importance of information accuracy and were confident in their ability to understand tracked data, however, there were differences in the extent to which food and activity data were shared and also a lack of understanding of the potential reuse and sharing of data by third parties. Conclusions Information literacy in this context involves developing awareness of the issues of accurate information recording, and how tracked information can be applied to support specific health goals. Developing awareness of how and when to share data, as well as of data ownership and privacy, are also important aspects of information literacy.

Getting enough quality sleep is a key part of a healthy lifestyle. Many people are tracking their sleep through mobile and wearable technology, together with contextual information that may influence sleep quality, like exercise, diet, and stress. However, there is limited support to help people make sense of this wealth of data, i.e., to explore the relationship between sleep data and contextual data. We strive to bridge this gap between sleep-tracking and sense-making through the design of SleepExplorer, a web-based tool that helps individuals understand sleep quality through multi-dimensional sleep structure and explore correlations between sleep data and contextual information. Based on a two-week field study with 12 participants, this paper offers a rich understanding on how technology can support sense-making on personal sleep data: SleepExplorer organizes a flux of sleep data into sleep structure, guides sleep-tracking activities, highlights connections between sleep and contributing factors, and supports individuals in taking actions. We discuss challenges and opportunities to inform the work of researchers and designers creating data-driven health and well-being applications.

Self-tracked health data can help people and their health providers understand and manage chronic conditions. This paper examines personal informatics practices and challenges in migraine, a condition characterized by unpredictable, intermittent, and poorly-understood symptoms. To investigate how people with migraine track and use data related to their condition, we surveyed 279 people with migraine and conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 survey respondents and 6 health providers. We find four distinct goals people bring to tracking and data: 1) answering questions about migraines, 2) predicting and preventing migraines, 3) monitoring and managing migraines over time, and 4) enabling motivation and social recognition. Each goal suggests different needs for the design of tools to support migraine tracking. We also find needs resulting from an individual's goals evolving over time, their varied personal experiences, and their communication and collaboration with providers. We discuss these goals and needs in terms of opportunities for personal informatics tools to facilitate learning to: 1) avoid common pitfalls; 2) support customization and flexibility; 3) account for burden, negativity, and lapsing; and 4) support management with uncertainty.

The hospital setting creates a high-stakes environment where patients' lives depend on accurate tracking of health data. Despite recent work emphasizing the importance of patients' engagement in their own health care, less is known about how patients track their health and care in the hospital. Through interviews and design probes, we investigated hospitalized patients' tracking activity and analyzed our results using the stage-based personal informatics model. We used this model to understand how to support the tracking needs of hospitalized patients at each stage. In this paper, we discuss hospitalized patients' needs for collaboratively tracking their health with their care team. We suggest future extensions of the stage-based model to accommodate collaborative tracking situations, such as hospitals, where data is collected, analyzed, and acted on by multiple people. Our findings uncover new directions for HCI research and highlight ways to support patients in tracking their care and improving patient safety.

Mental wellness is a desirable health outcome for students. However, current personal informatics systems do not adequately support students in creating concrete mental health-related goals and turning them into actionable plans. In this paper, we introduce MindNavigator - a workshop in which groups of college students were invited to generate behavioral change goals to manage daily life stress and practice personalized interventions for two weeks. We describe the manner in which participants identified both stressors and pleasures to create actionable, engaging, and open-ended behavioral plans that aided in stress relief. We found that the social nature of the workshop helped participants understand themselves and execute self-intervention in new ways. Through this practice, we build on prior studies to propose an analytical framework of personal informatics for mental wellness.

This paper presents a designerly exploration of the potential values of parent-tracked baby data in interactions between parents and healthcare professionals (HCPs). Where previous work has used parent-tracked data as part of the solution to a problem, we contribute by starting our design exploration from data, using it as creative material in our design process. As we intend to work towards a system that could be viable across different levels of care, we invited three different types of HCPs and five families with newborns, for a five-week situated design exploration. Facilitated by an open and dynamic data collection toolkit, parents and HCPs could together decide what data to collect. In a continuous dialogue, they reflected on the relevance of that data in their interaction. Based on this, we continuously and remotely developed two concepts.

Personal informatics technologies, such as consumer fitness tracking devices, have an enormous potential to transform the self-management of chronic conditions. However, it is unclear how people living with relapsing and progressive illnesses experience personal informatics tools in everyday life: what values and challenges are associated with their use? This research informs the design of future health tracking technologies through an ethnographic design study of the use and experience of personal informatics tools in multiple sclerosis (MS) self-management. Initial findings suggest that future health tracking technologies should acknowledge people's emotional wellbeing and foster flexible and mindful self-tracking, rather than focusing only on tracking primary disease indicators and optimising health behaviours.

We report on the design of ThinkActive - a system to encourage primary aged school children to reflect on their own personal activity data in the classroom. We deployed the system with a cohort of 30 school children, over a six-week period, in partnership with an English Premier League Football club's health and nutrition programme. The system utilizes inexpensive activity trackers and pseudonymous avatars to promote reflection with personal data using an in-situ display within the classroom. Our design explores pseudonymity as an approach to managing privacy and personal data within a public setting. We report on the motivations, challenges, and opportunities for students, teachers, and third-party providers to engage in the collection and sharing of activity data with primary school children.