Youth concerns and responses to self-tracking tools and personal informatics systems

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

What do Teens Make of Personal Informatics?: Young People's Responses to Self-Tracking Practices for Self-Determined Motives

Personal informatics (PI) technologies allow users to collect data about aspects of their lifestyle like mood or step count. Though teens increasingly encounter and use such technologies, little is known about how they ascribe meaning to their own PI activities. We report a qualitative study of the PI experiences of eighteen teens (aged 14 – 17). Following a learning phase focused on interpreting PI data, participants chose a personal goal that interested them and a PI tool to track it for 4-8 weeks in everyday contexts. Participants proved to be competent, flexible users of PI tools, tracking a range of meaningful life factors, from ‘worries’ to ‘exercise’; they valued learning about ‘natural patterns’ in their lives and were motivated to manage their emotions and evaluate whether they were doing the right thing. Our findings contribute to understanding how young people can engage in appropriation and interpretation of PI data – suggesting opportunities for educational interventions and design

What do teens make of personal informatics? Youth responses to self-tracking practices within a classroom setting

Personal informatics (PI) technologies allow users to collect data about aspects of their lifestyle like mood or step count. Though teens increasingly encounter and use such technologies, little is known about how they ascribe meaning to their own PI activities. We report a qualitative study of the PI experiences of eighteen teens (aged 14 – 17). Following a learning phase focused on interpreting PI data, participants chose a personal goal that interested them and a PI tool to track it for 4-8 weeks in everyday contexts. Participants proved to be competent, flexible users of PI tools, tracking a range of meaningful life factors, from ‘worries’ to ‘exercise’; they valued learning about ‘natural patterns’ in their lives and were motivated to manage their emotions and evaluate whether they were doing the right thing. Our findings contribute to understanding how young people can engage in appropriation and interpretation of PI data – suggesting opportunities for educational interventions and design

Putting the self in self-tracking: the value of a co-designed ‘how might you’ self-tracking guide for teenagers

Although teenagers engage with Personal Informatics tools to track their health and fitness, many do so without adequate guidance, and they express concerns regarding the potential for these practices to bring harm. Further research is needed to understand how we might leverage resources beyond these tools to support young self-trackers. We worked with 44 teenagers (aged 13-18 years) in the United Kingdom in two series of online workshops to co-design a reimagined 'how might you' guide to promote lifelong, healthy behaviors with self-tracking tools. Our findings emphasize the importance of flexible resources that can support teens' self-tracking practices. For example, guidance on asking critical questions can be particularly valuable in the preparation and reflection stages of self-tracking. To better design teens' interactions with health technologies, particularly Personal Informatics tools, we must think critically about how we design the broader information ecosystems within which these tools reside

Supporting Collaborative Health Tracking in the Hospital: Patients' Perspectives

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

Not on my watch: understanding the affordances of self-tracking for adolescents' social and psychological wellbeing

We can see aspects of our everyday lives through data – how many steps we took to the supermarket, how many kilometres we covered walking the dog, or how many calories we burned cycling to work. Whilst self-tracking is not new, and indeed not always digital, we have seen the continuing development of digital tools that enable us to monitor, control, and analyse vast quantities of personal health data. Self-tracking tools have become increasingly relevant in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 has raised important questions about what it means to track data, what it means to be tracked, and how we understand the consequences of tracked data. Never has it been more apparent that our self-tracked data have social consequences. We know that many adolescents engage in self-tracking practices. Nevertheless, existing research on adolescents’ self-tracking is limited outside of intervention-based studies. Most work has focused on adult users; however, adolescents’ self-tracking practices do not always map neatly onto those of adults. In this thesis, I describe insights from my mixed methods study involving over 600 adolescents in the United Kingdom across an online survey, online interviews, and online co-design workshops. Drawing data from these methods together, I explore the affordances of self-tracking for adolescents’ social and psychological wellbeing to better understand how we can take positive steps forward to empower adolescents’ autonomous choices around their self-tracking practices. My empirical findings emphasise the complexity and variation in adolescents’ self-tracking practices, illuminated by the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Adolescents negotiate complex sociomaterial relations with self-tracking tools, with key tensions around practices of creativity and control. I argue that the limited attention paid to adolescent voices in self-tracking research and design is problematic and that urgent work is needed to ensure that these valuable perspectives are heard and heeded

The Promise of Health Information Technology: Ensuring that Florida's Children Benefit

Substantial policy interest in supporting the adoption of Health Information Technology (HIT) by the public and private sectors over the last 5 -- 7 years, was spurred in particular by the release of multiple Institute of Medicine reports documenting the widespread occurrence of medical errors and poor quality of care (Institute of Medicine, 1999 & 2001). However, efforts to focus on issues unique to children's health have been left out of many of initiatives. The purpose of this report is to identify strategies that can be taken by public and private entities to promote the use of HIT among providers who serve children in Florida

Smartphones

Many of the research approaches to smartphones actually regard them as more or less transparent points of access to other kinds of communication experiences. That is, rather than considering the smartphone as something in itself, the researchers look at how individuals use the smartphone for their communicative purposes, whether these be talking, surfing the web, using on-line data access for off-site data sources, downloading or uploading materials, or any kind of interaction with social media. They focus not so much on the smartphone itself but on the activities that people engage in with their smartphones

Digital Mental Health and Social Connectedness

A detailed understanding of the mental health needs of people from refugee backgrounds is crucial for the design of inclusive mental health technologies. We present a qualitative account of the digital mental health experiences of women from refugee backgrounds. Working with community members and community workers of a charitable organisation for refugee women in the UK, we identify social and structural challenges, including loneliness and access to mental health technologies. Participants' accounts document their collective agency in addressing these challenges and supporting social connectedness and personal wellbeing in daily life: participants reported taking part in community activities as volunteers, sharing technological expertise, and using a wide range of non-mental health-focused technologies to support their mental health, from playing games to supporting religious practices. Our findings suggest that, rather than focusing only on individual self-care, research also needs to leverage community-driven approaches to foster social mental health experiences, from altruism to connectedness and belonging

User interface design for mobile-based sexual health interventions for young people: Design recommendations from a qualitative study on an online Chlamydia clinical care pathway

Background: The increasing pervasiveness of mobile technologies has given potential to transform healthcare by facilitating clinical management using software applications. These technologies may provide valuable tools in sexual health care and potentially overcome existing practical and cultural barriers to routine testing for sexually transmitted infections. In order to inform the design of a mobile health application for STIs that supports self-testing and self-management by linking diagnosis with online care pathways, we aimed to identify the dimensions and range of preferences for user interface design features among young people. Methods: Nine focus group discussions were conducted (n=49) with two age-stratified samples (16 to 18 and 19 to 24 year olds) of young people from Further Education colleges and Higher Education establishments. Discussions explored young people's views with regard to: the software interface; the presentation of information; and the ordering of interaction steps. Discussions were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Interview transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Four over-arching themes emerged: privacy and security; credibility; user journey support; and the task-technology-context fit. From these themes, 20 user interface design recommendations for mobile health applications are proposed. For participants, although privacy was a major concern, security was not perceived as a major potential barrier as participants were generally unaware of potential security threats and inherently trusted new technology. Customisation also emerged as a key design preference to increase attractiveness and acceptability. Conclusions: Considerable effort should be focused on designing healthcare applications from the patient's perspective to maximise acceptability. The design recommendations proposed in this paper provide a valuable point of reference for the health design community to inform development of mobile-based health interventions for the diagnosis and treatment of a number of other conditions for this target group, while stimulating conversation across multidisciplinary communities