Episodic use: Practices of care in self-tracking

The development of self-tracking technologies has resulted in a burst of research considering how self-tracking practices manifest themselves in everyday life. Based on a 5-month-long photo elicitation study of Danish self-trackers, we argue that no matter how committed people might be to tracking their activities, their use of self-tracking technologies can be best described as episodic rather than continuous. Using Annemarie Mol’s theoretical framework for understanding care practices as a lens, we show how episodic use can be interpreted through the logic of care. By using self-tracking devices episodically, users employ strategies of care in a way that can be productive and useful. These strategies often come in conflict with the logics of choice that underlie the design of many self-tracking technologies. We argue that this has consequences for the way self-tracking devices need to be imagined, designed, and introduced as part of workplace and insurance-type tracking programs

Distributed tracking with sequential Monte Carlo methods for manoeuvrable sensors

Nonlinear distributed tracking for a single target is addressed in this paper. This problem consists of tracking a target of interest while moving the sensors to `best' positions according to an critera appropriate for the problem. Both target tracking and manoeuvring of sensors are carried out jointly using a novel Sequential Monte Carlo technique. The proposed technique is illustrated using a bearing-only problem and simulations are used to compare the performance of the proposed technique with distributed tracking using fixed sensors.Nonlinear distributed tracking for a single target is addressed in this paper. This problem consists of tracking a target of interest while moving the sensors to `best' positions according to an critera appropriate for the problem. Both target tracking and manoeuvring of sensors are carried out jointly using a novel Sequential Monte Carlo technique. The proposed technique is illustrated using a bearing-only problem and simulations are used to compare the performance of the proposed technique with distributed tracking using fixed sensors

A comparison of head and manual control for a position-control pursuit tracking task

Head control was compared with manual control in a pursuit tracking task involving proportional controlled-element dynamics. An integrated control/display system was used to explore tracking effectiveness in horizontal and vertical axes tracked singly and concurrently. Compared with manual tracking, head tracking resulted in a 50 percent greater rms error score, lower pilot gain, greater high-frequency phase lag and greater low-frequency remnant. These differences were statistically significant, but differences between horizontal- and vertical-axis tracking and between 1- and 2-axis tracking were generally small and not highly significant. Manual tracking results were matched with the optimal control model using pilot-related parameters typical of those found in previous manual control studies. Head tracking performance was predicted with good accuracy using the manual tracking model plus a model for head/neck response dynamics obtained from the literature

A novel method for estimating myocardial strain: assessment of deformation tracking against reference magnetic resonance methods in healthy volunteers

We developed a novel method for tracking myocardial deformation using cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) cine imaging. We hypothesised that circumferential strain using deformation-tracking has comparable diagnostic performance to a validated method (Displacement Encoding with Stimulated Echoes- DENSE) and potentially diagnostically superior to an established cine-strain method (feature-tracking). 81 healthy adults (44.6 ± 17.7 years old, 47% male), without any history of cardiovascular disease, underwent CMR at 1.5T including cine, DENSE, and late gadolinium enhancement in subjects >45 years. Acquisitions were divided into 6 segments, and global and segmental peak circumferential strain were derived and analysed by age and sex. Peak circumferential strain differed between the 3 groups (DENSE: -19.4 ± 4.8 %; deformation-tracking: -16.8 ± 2.4 %; feature-tracking: -28.7 ± 4.8%) (ANOVA with Tukey post-hoc, F-value 279.93, p<0.01). DENSE and deformation-tracking had better reproducibility than feature-tracking. Intra-class correlation co-efficient was >0.90. Larger magnitudes of strain were detected in women using deformation-tracking and DENSE, but not feature-tracking. Compared with a reference method (DENSE), deformation-tracking using cine imaging has similar diagnostic performance for circumferential strain assessment in healthy individuals. Deformation-tracking could potentially obviate the need for bespoke strain sequences, reducing scanning time and is more reproducible than feature-tracking

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