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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.

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.

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.

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.

Current personal informatics models consider reflection as an important stage in users’ journeys with trackers. However, these models describe reflection from a meta perspective and it remains unclear what this stage entails. To design interactive technologies that support reflection, we need a more thorough understanding of how people reflect on their personal data in practice. To that end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with users of fitness trackers and an online survey to study practices in reflecting on fitness data. Our results show that users reported reflecting on data despite lacking reflection support from their tracking technology. Based on our results, we introduce the Technology-Mediated Reflection Model, which describes conditions and barriers for reflection on personal data. Our model consists of the temporal and conceptual cycles of reflection and helps designers identify the possible barriers a user might face when using a system for reflection.

Reflection is an often addressed design goal in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. An increasing number of artefacts for reflection have been developed in recent years. However, evaluating if and how an interactive technology helps a user reflect is still complex. This makes it difficult to compare artefacts (or prototypes) for reflection, impeding future design efforts. To address this issue, we developed the \emph{Technology-Supported Reflection Inventory} (TSRI), which is a scale that evaluates how effectively a system supports reflection. We first created a list of possible scale items based on past work in defining reflection. The items were then reviewed by experts. Next, we performed exploratory factor analysis to reduce the scale to its final length of nine items. Subsequently, we confirmed test-retest validity of our instrument, as well as its construct validity. The TSRI enables researchers and practitioners to compare prototypes designed to support reflection., CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21), May 8--13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan

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.

Personal informatics technologies support the collection of and reflection on personal data, but enabling people to learn from and act on this data is still an on-going challenge. Sharing and discussing data is one way people can learn from it, but as yet, little research explores how peer discourses around data can shape understandings and promote action. We ran 3 workshops with 5-week follow-ups, giving 18 people the opportunity to swap their data and discuss it with another person. We found that these workshops helped them to recontextualise and to better understand their data, identify new strategies for changing their behaviour and motivated people to commit to changes in the future. These findings have implications for how personal informatics tools could help people identify opportunities for change and feel motivated to try out new strategies.

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.

With the development of sensing technology and the popularization of quantified-self devices, there are increasing types of health-related data that can be sensed, visualized and presented to the user. However, most existing quantified-self applications are designed to support self-management and self-reflection; only a few studies so far have investigated the social aspect of quantified-self data. In this study, we investigated the social role of quantified-self data by introducing the design and evaluation of SocialBike—a digitally augmented bicycle that aims to increase the user’s intrinsic motivation in physical activity through on-site quantified-self data sharing. We conducted a controlled experiment on a cycling simulation system. Two forms of SocialBike’s on-bike display were evaluated with 36 participants. We used the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory to collect quantitative data about users’ intrinsic motivation in physical activity; the cycling simulation system recorded quantitative data about user behavior. Qualitative data was collected through semi-structured interviews. We conducted paired sample t-test to analyze both types of quantitative data; qualitative data were analyzed by the method of thematic analysis. The results show that SocialBike’s front display significantly increased users’ intrinsic motivation in physical activity. A total of nine themes were identified from the qualitative analysis, providing supplementary explanations for the quantitative results and additional insights into the overall design.

INTRODUCTION: Quantified-self application is widely used in sports and health management; the type and amount of data that can be detected and 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. OBJECTIVES: To design and evaluate SocialBike - a digitally augmented bicycle that aims to increase user’s motivation in physical activity by showing their quantified-self data to each other. METHODS: We conducted a within-subject experiment on a cycling simulation system with 20 participants. The on-bike display of SocialBike was compared to a control display to evaluate its impact on two dependent variables, including user’s intrinsic motivation in physical activity and social relatedness with other cyclists nearby. Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI) was used to measure users’ self-reported intrinsic motivation and social relatedness. The user’s cycling behaviour data were also recorded by the simulation system. We extracted six indicators about the two dependent variables from the behaviour data. Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews. We conducted a paired sample T-test on both types of quantitative data. Qualitative data were analysed by the method of thematic analysis. RESULTS: The results of the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory show that SocialBike’s on-bike display has significant positive effects on four subscales, including intrinsic motivation, perceived competence, values/usefulness, and relatedness. The results of user cycling behaviour indicate that SocialBike increased user’s social relatedness with other cyclists nearby by significantly affecting three indicators. Three themes were identified from qualitative data, including motivation, social interaction, and data visualization. The qualitative result provides supplementary evidence for the quantitative result and additional insights into the overall design of SocialBike. CONCLUSION: SocialBike as a platform for sharing quantified-self data have positive effects in enhancing users’ intrinsic motivation in physical activity and social relatedness with other cyclists nearby.

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.

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.

Personal Informatics (PI) systems allow users to collect and review personally relevant information. The purpose commonly envisioned for these systems is that they provide users with actionable, data-driven self-insight to help them change their behavioral patterns for the better. Here, we review relevant theory as well as empirical evidence for this ‘Self-Improvement Hypothesis’. From a corpus of 6568 only 24 studies met the selection criteria of being a peer-reviewed empirical study reporting on actionable, data-driven insights from PI data, using a ‘clean’ PI system with no other intervention techniques (e.g. additional coaching) on a non-clinical population. First results are promising—many of the selected articles report users gaining actionable insights—but we do note a number of methodological issues that make these results difficult to interpret. We conclude that more work is needed to investigate the Self-Improvement Hypothesis and provide a set of recommendations for future work.

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.

Bullet journals are hand-written and self-created combinations of calendar, journal and planner. Central to this practice is how personal information is managed through a craft-based process. Based on a qualitative study, we discuss a set of themes that emerged in our analysis of this practice. We discuss how open-ended use of various materials for crafting of personal information engages in: 1) deliberate and strategic boundary work of what information to include and how combinations of data provide holistic and novel views of practitioner's life situations; 2) processes of self-creation and reflection on personal life trajectories; 3) appreciation of ourselves and the world around us as imperfect; and 4) ways of resisting the "business-like efficiency" that come with the large quantities of information that permeate contemporary life. We propose that this opens up new directions for thinking about how technologies of personal information may come into play in people's lives.

The spread of wearable technologies is paving the way for the mass-scale adoption of self-tracking instruments, which are progressively integrating into different social practices. Among these, sport seems to be a promising domain in which Personal Informatics tools can support individuals in performing their activities and in achieving their situated goals. In this article, we conducted semi-structured interviews with amateur and elite athletes to explore what they seek in their trackers, how such instruments may impact on their “mind”, by affecting their motivation and attention during workouts and races, and how sports data are intertwined with other information pertaining to their lifestyle. On the basis of these findings we discussed three themes that may be relevant for Personal Informatics, also proposing a series of implications for design that may help researchers in designing self-tracking tools for sport.

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.

We consider why and how women track their menstrual cycles, examining their experiences to uncover design opportunities and extend the field's understanding of personal informatics tools. To understand menstrual cycle tracking practices, we collected and analyzed data from three sources: 2,000 reviews of popular menstrual tracking apps, a survey of 687 people, and follow-up interviews with 12 survey respondents. We find that women track their menstrual cycle for varied reasons that include remembering and predicting their period as well as informing conversations with healthcare providers. Participants described six methods of tracking their menstrual cycles, including use of technology, awareness of their premenstrual physiological states, and simply remembering. Although women find apps and calendars helpful, these methods are ineffective when predictions of future menstrual cycles are inaccurate. Designs can create feelings of exclusion for gender and sexual minorities. Existing apps also generally fail to consider life stages that women experience, including young adulthood, pregnancy, and menopause. Our findings encourage expanding the field's conceptions of personal informatics.

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.

Personal Informatics (PI) systems allow their users to collect data from a variety of sources for the purpose of extracting meaningful insights and making positive changes in their lives. Emerging consumer-grade Brain- Computer Interface (BCI)/EEG devices may provide an additional source of data for incorporating into PI systems. To explore users’ expectations for brain- related PI systems we provided participants with a consumer-grade BCI headset and prototype mobile application capable of visualizing and recording their brain waves. Participants were interviewed to assess expectations for this type of technology. Our work contributes an understanding of users’ various motivations for tracking brain activity data within a personal informatics system. We present our findings so far and discuss their implications for the design of a Cognitive Personal Informatics system, which we intend to deploy in a follow-up longitudinal field study.

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.

While recent research has emphasized the importance of understanding the lived experience of personal tracking, very little is known about the everyday coordination between tracker use and the surrounding environment. We combine behavioral data from trackers with video recordings from wearable cameras, in an attempt to understand how usage unfolds in daily life and how it is shaped by the context of use. We recorded twelve participants' daily use of activity trackers, collecting and analyzing 244 incidents where activity trackers were used. Among our findings, tracker use was strongly driven by reflection and learning-in action, contrasting the traditional view that learning is one of deep exploration, following the collection of data on behaviors. We leverage on these insights and propose three directions for the design of activity trackers: facilitating learning through glances, providing normative feedback and facilitating micro-plans.

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.

World of Warcraft (WoW) may be a source of inspiration to enrich the Personal Informatics systems user's experience and, at the same time, improve gamification design. Through the findings of a four-year reflexive ethnography in WoW, I outline how its game design elements support players in making sense of their own data, emphasizing how "game numbers" are turned into meanings. On the basis of the study results, I propose a series of design considerations to be used in the design of self-tracking systems, which recommend to embody data into digital entities, provide different analytical tools depending on the users' expertise through a flexible model, and foster the formation of "communities of practice" in order to support learning processes.

Extended periods of uninterrupted sedentary behavior are detrimental to long-term health. While prolonged sitting is prevalent among information workers, it is difficult for them to break prolonged sedentary behavior due to the nature of their work. This work aims to understand information workers' intentions & practices around standing or moving breaks. We developed Time for Break, a break prompting system that enables people to set their desired work duration and prompts them to stand up or move. We conducted an exploratory field study (N = 25) with Time for Break to collect participants' work & break intentions and behaviors for three weeks, followed by semi-structured interviews. We examined rich contexts affecting participants' receptiveness to standing or moving breaks, and identified how their habit strength and self-regulation are related to their break-taking intentions & practices. We discuss design implications for interventions to break up periods of prolonged sedentary behavior in workplaces.

Digital self-tracking technologies offer many potential benefits over self-tracking with paper notebooks. However, they are often too rigid to support people's practical and emotional needs in everyday settings. To inform the design of more flexible self-tracking tools, we examine bullet journaling: an analogue and customisable approach for logging and reflecting on everyday life. Analysing a corpus of paper bullet journal photos and related conversations on Instagram, we found that individuals extended and adapted bullet journaling systems to their changing practical and emotional needs through: (1) creating and combining personally meaningful visualisations of different types of trackers, such as habit, mood, and symptom trackers; (2) engaging in mindful reflective thinking through design practices and self-reflective strategies; and (3) posting photos of paper journals online to become part of a self-tracking culture of sharing and learning. We outline two interrelated design directions for flexible and mindful self-tracking: digitally extending analogue self-tracking and supporting digital self-tracking as a mindful design practice.

In recent years, we witnessed the spreading of a plethora of wearable and mobile technologies allowing for a continuous and “transparent” gathering of personal data [...]

In situ self-report is widely used in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and for assessment and intervention in health and wellness. Unfortunately, it remains limited by high burdens. We examine unlock journaling as an alternative. Specifically, we build upon recent work to introduce single-slide unlock journaling gestures appropriate for health and wellness measures. We then present the first field study comparing unlock journaling with traditional diaries and notification-based reminders in self-report of health and wellness measures. We find unlock journaling is less intrusive than reminders, dramatically improves frequency of journaling, and can provide equal or better timeliness. Where appropriate to broader design needs, unlock journaling is thus an overall promising method for in situ self-report.

Nowadays Personal Informatics (PI) devices are used for sensing and saving personal data, everywhere and at any time, helping people improve their lives by highlighting areas of good and bad performances and providing a general awareness of different levels of conduct. However, not all these data are suitable to be automatically collected. This is especially true for emotions and mood. Moreover, users without experience in self-tracking may have a misperception of PI applications’ limits and potentialities. We believe that current PI tools are not designed with enough understanding of such users’ needs, desires, and problems they may encounter in their everyday lives. We designed and prototype the Mood TUI (Tangible User Interface), a PI tool that supports the self-reporting of mood data using a tangible interface. The platform is able to gather six different mood states and it was tested through several participatory design sessions in a secondary/high school. The solution proposed allows gathering mood values in an amusing, simple, and appealing way. Users appreciated the prototypes, suggesting several possible improvements as well as ideas on how to use the prototype in similar or totally different contexts, and giving us hints for future research.