Daniel Epstein (he/him): Hi, I'm Daniel Epstein from UC Irvine. On behalf of my team of coauthors, I'm thrilled to present our work mapping and taking stock of the past decade of personal informatics literature.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): Personal informatics systems, or devices and Apps which help people collect personally relevant information for their own self understanding, have continued to proliferate over the course of the past decade.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): It's emerged as a prominent some field within HCI and Ubicomp, both in the design and development of tracking tools, like the award-winning UbiFit Garden, and in the study of Apps and devices like Fitbit and Apple Watches, which are worn by one in five Americans.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): We therefore sought to provide a snapshot of the field to help the research community identify missed and future opportunities. We reviewed over 500 papers from the past decade index by ACM, IEEE, and PubMed examining the domains, methods, and styles of contributions typically explored.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): Since the full map of the literature is in the paper, we wanted to take this presentation opportunity to reflect a bit more on the state of the field of personal informatics.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): I therefore asked scholars on social media to suggest what we should consider studying more, and in the rest of this presentation I'll highlight some future directions suggested by researchers alongside some of our findings.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): A trend that we noticed is the wide array of domains studied and designed for, which Christina Chung echoed in considering what counts as personal informatics data.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): Most research, 83% of the papers that we examined, have looked at health and wellness tracking, with physical activity being a particular focus in nearly half of these papers.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): Continuing to explore new domains is important for better understanding the different ways people receive value from tracking, the negative consequences of tracking, and opportunities for future technologies.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): We see value in spending more effort understanding and supporting tracking and widespread domains like personal finances and in domains crucial for society like sustainability.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): Researchers like Sarita Schonebeck also point to the importance of understanding self tracking in newer media like content creators leveraging social media analytics for self-understanding.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): In our review we found increasing interest in studying and supporting different stakeholders using self tracking in social settings, such as in healthcare settings, among families, in athletic teams, or groups or in society at large.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): Sean Munson, Herman Saksono, and Julie Kientz all see this as an important direction, highlighting and need to move data across settings and supporting collaborative tracking.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): Researchers like John Froehlich and Eun Kyoung Choe hope that we can design more and better tools to help people who have been left out by current self-tracking tools, such as people with disabilities.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): But there's still a lot of work necessary to think through how to personalize or re-envision how these people track.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): A challenge, we observed, is that, as the field has matured, a lower rate of publications contribute new artifacts or systems.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): This may be a typical evolution of research topics, but as a field it's worth considering how we can promote more artifacts such as encouraging demonstrations, evaluating efficacy prior to behavior change, or evaluating lower fidelity prototypes.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): Alongside alongside significant interest in broadening what we're designing tools to support,
Daniel Epstein (he/him): researchers like Katie Siek, Ian Li, James Landay, Edison Thomaz, and Matthew Kay also hope the field deepens our investigation and revisits classic problems core to the design of self tracking tools, like improving reflection around self-tracked data.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): They point for a need for tools to move beyond basic analytics to deeper insights, highlight uncertainty, provide mindfulness, and support telling stories.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): In our review we noticed the research has, by and large, focused on studying and improving collection and reflection.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): Improving technology's ability to support these goals will make tracking more viable, but we also hope to see more work examining how technology can support less studied stages of self tracking like preparing to track,
Daniel Epstein (he/him): are moving from reflecting on data to acting on it. It's perhaps a little less obvious how to leverage technology to address these barriers, but important for making self tracking accessible and useful.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): Julie Kientz, Jon Froehlich, and Sean Munson also hoped for more work on the study of, and support for, self tracked data in building population-level understanding around how we live and experience the world.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): But Sean and Jon highlight that this is much more of a research dream than a reality and it's only really possible by large companies.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): while Julie points out that building this understanding from current self tracking tools is biased towards who uses them, excluding some of the most vulnerable and marginalized people and limiting generalizability.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): And finally, researchers like Chris Elsden and Jon Froehlich, call on the field to consider the role of personal informatics technology in perpetuating surveillance, and wonder whether there can be business models which allow individuals to keep their data personal.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): Some papers in our review have considered these questions, such as designing a system to allow participants to filter data from being shared with researchers,
Daniel Epstein (he/him): and surfacing study findings around data disclosure concerns. However, very few papers proposed technical or human-centered solutions to these infrastructural problems, and we see this as a major challenge for the field to consider moving forward.
Daniel Epstein (he/him): We love to keep this conversation going, so check out the paper and feel free to mention me on social media if you have any other thoughts. You can also search through the tagged list of publications and an online tool that we made that accompanies this paper. Thanks!