Today I presented our paper 'Personal Tracking as Lived Informatics' at CHI. By interviewing 22 people about how they were using personal tracking devices, such as Nike Fuelband, Jawbone Up, FitBit, and mobile apps (e.g. RunKeeper and MyFitnessPal).
Among the findings, we uncover how the people we talk to use multiple trackers, and track multiple things. They switch between trackers, as well as what they track, over time. While they say that they do not share tracked data to social networks, they do track together with people in their lives. Furthermore, while they track for a long time, they rarely look at their historical data.
We discuss our findings and present an alternative view to Personal Informatics which we term Lived Informatics. Lived Informatics emphasises the emotionality of tracking and that tracking is something done with an outlook for the future, rather than part of a rational scientific process for optimising self as seen in Quantified Self and in Personal Informatics.
We are very happy the paper got an Honorable Mention.
The paper: