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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...

This paper describes a novel methodology to evaluate a social media application in its formative phase of design. Taking advantage of the experiences developed in the Alternate Reality Games, we propose to insert game mechanics in the test setting of a formative evaluation of a prototypical social system. As a use case, we present the evaluation of WantEat, a prototypical social mobile application in the gastronomical domain. The evaluation highlighted how the gamification of a field trial can yield good results when evaluating social applications in prototypical status. From a methodological point of view, gamifying a field trial overcomes the cold start problem, caused by the absence of active communities, which can prevent the participation of users and therefore the collection of reliable data. Our experience showed that the gamification of a field evaluation is feasible and can likely increase the quantity of both browsing actions and social actions performed by users. Based on these results, we then are able to provide a set of guidelines to gamify the evaluation session of an interactive system.

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 recent years, User Modeling (UM) scenery is changing. With the recent advancements in wearable and mobile technologies, the amount and type of data that can be gathered about users and employed to build User Models is rapidly expanding. UM can now be enriched with data regarding different aspects of people's daily lives and is likely to deliver novel personalized services. All these changes bring forth new research questions about the kinds of services which could be improved, which of them would be the most useful, the ways of conveying effectively new forms of recommendations, and how users would perceive them. In this paper the authors tried to find answers to some of these questions by exploiting a novel personalized system to conduct a qualitative user study, with the aim to understand users' needs and expectations w.r.t. personalization enabled by the presence of wearable and mobile technologies.

Personal Informatics systems allow users to self-track a variety of states and behaviors. However, not all these data are suitable to be automatically collected. This is especially true for emotions and mood. These data require to be self-reported by the users and this activity can be very cumbersome, requiring an high compliance to be effective: instead users often fail in reporting their data due to forgetfulness, lack of time and motivation. To overcome these problems, we propose to exploit Tangible User Interface for relieving the task of self-reporting. In particular, we present a Personal Informatics Tangible Interface able to support users in self-reporting their mood. This solution allows the collection of emotional states in an amusing, simple and appealing way by means of a physical object.

Although in recent years the Quantified Self (QS) application domain is growing, there are still some palpable fundamental problems that relegate the QS movement in a phase of low maturity. The first is a technological problem, and specifically, a lack of maturity in technologies for the collection, processing, and data visualization. This is accompanied by a perhaps more fundamental problem of deficit, bias, and lack of integration of aspects concerning the human side of the QS idea. The step that the authors tried to make in this chapter is to highlight aspects that could lead to a more robust approach in QS area. This was done, primarily, through a new approach in data visualization and, secondly, through a necessary management of complexity, both in technological terms and, for what concerns the human side of the whole issue, in theoretical terms. The authors have gone a little further stressing how the future directions of research could lead to significant impacts on both individual and social level.

In this paper we introduce the idea of interaction with networks of socially intelligent objects as a way of supporting tourists and introducing them to the culture of a territory and as a way of maintaing the cultural heritage of a territory alive. We illustrate this idea with an application we designed in the field of gastronomy. Socially intelligent objects are able to maintain and aggregate knowledge about themselves and their world and are able to establish social relations with other objects and people. In this way they become hubs which allow tourists to get in touch with the world of the objects which is made of a territory, its culture and traditions, people and other objects. We support natural forms of interaction without requiring any electronic infrastructring of the objects. In particular, we designed an interaction paradigm supporting a playful enhancing experience when interacting with objects. We also support a continuum of experience in the real and virtual world.