Personal Informatics, Self-Insight, and Behavior Change: A Critical Review of Current Literature

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

Design beyond the numbers: sharing, comparing, storytelling and the need for a Quantified Us Design Beyond the Numbers: Sharing, Comparing, Storytelling and the Need for a Quantified Us

Abstract. In this article we discuss the social side of self-tracking. Technologies that allow users to keep track of various aspects of their lives tend to focus on individual needs and goals (the Quantified Self), but as these technologies become more enmeshed with users' lives, appropriation practices reveal a desire of users to connect to others through self-tracking. To better support these needs, we argue for an expansion of the technology and the associated scientific field toward a more socially oriented Quantified Us, that values and facilitates interpersonal communication and connection through selftracked data. These matters are illustrated with examples from self-tracking practice, highlighting communication needs and existing workarounds associated with self-tracking. We conclude with directions for future work

Tell-Tale data: the value of self-tracked data for healthcare professionals

In current research on the use of self-tracked data, complete and reliable data are often assumed as conditional for effective use. We argue that this is not only unrealistic, but also not required, for many potential benefits of sharing self-tracking data with healthcare professionals. In this paper, we discuss the value of a large historical account of day-to-day health and lifestyle data as a source of information for healthcare professionals. We see an important role for data as a tool in supporting communication and joint sense- and decision-making between client and healthcare professional

Are trackers social actors? The role of self-tracking on self-evaluation

Despite the increased usage and potential benefits of self-tracking technologies for pursuing healthy lifestyles, the relationship that users have with these personal devices has remained under-studied. The current paper presents a field study to explore the perceived role of self-tracking devices as social actors. Participants received a pedometer which they carried on their person for one day. Users’ access to numerical feedback and the feeling of being tracked were manipulated, and users were interviewed afterwards regarding their experiences and their perceived social relationship to the tracker. Results of a thematic analysis indicated that in general, the feeling of being tracked led to higher self-awareness regarding participants’ walking activity. In particular, having access to agent feedback gave rise to more frequent self-evaluative reports towards one’s performance as well as a closer relationship between the device and its user. The results extend the CASA (Computers As Social Actors) paradigm by demonstrating that the capturing (and feeding back) of data can make a device be perceived as a social actor and be described in relational terms, even in the absence of clear social cues