Laura R. Pina

Reconsidering the device in the drawer: lapses as a design opportunity in personal informatics

People stop using personal tracking tools over time, referred to as the lapsing stage of their tool use. We explore how designs can support people when they lapse in tracking, considering how to design data representations for a person who lapses in Fitbit use. Through a survey of 141 people who had lapsed in using Fitbit, we identified three use patterns and four perspectives on tracking. Participants then viewed seven visual representations of their Fitbit data and seven approaches to framing this data. Participant Fitbit use and perspective on tracking influenced their preference, which we surface in a series of contrasts. Specifically, our findings guide selecting appropriate aggregations from Fitbit use (e.g., aggregate more when someone has less data), choosing an appropriate framing technique from tracking perspective (e.g., ensure framing aligns with how the person feels about tracking), and creating appropriate social comparisons (e.g., portray the person positively compared to peers). We conclude by discussing how these contrasts suggest new designs and opportunities in other tracking domains.

Examining Menstrual Tracking to Inform the Design of Personal Informatics Tools

We consider why and how women track their menstrual cycles, examining their experiences to uncover design opportunities and extend the fields understanding of personal informatics tools. To understand menstrual cycle tracking practices, we collected and analyzed data from three sources: 2,000 reviews of popular menstrual tracking apps, a survey of 687 people, and follow-up interviews with 12 survey respondents. We find that women track their menstrual cycle for varied reasons that include remembering and predicting their period as well as informing conversations with healthcare providers. Participants described six methods of tracking their menstrual cycles, including use of technology, awareness of their premenstrual physiological states, and simply remembering. Although women find apps and calendars helpful, these methods are ineffective when predictions of future menstrual cycles are inaccurate. Designs can create feelings of exclusion for gender and sexual minorities. Existing apps also generally fail to consider life stages that women experience, including young adulthood, pregnancy, and menopause. Our findings encourage expanding the fields conceptions of personal informatics.

From Personal Informatics to Family Informatics: Understanding Family Practices around Health Monitoring

In families composed of parents and children, the health of parents and children is often interrelated: the health of children can have an impact on the health of parents, and vice versa. However, the design of health tracking technologies typically focuses on individual self-tracking and self-management, not yet addressing family health in a unified way. To examine opportunities for family-centered health informatics, we interviewed 14 typically healthy families, interviewed 10 families with a child with a chronic condition, and conducted three participatory design sessions with children aged 7 to 11. Although we identified similarities between family-centered tracking and personal self-tracking, we also found families want to: (1) identify ripple effects between family members; (2) consider both caregivers and children as trackers to support distributing the burdens of tracking across family members; and (3) identify and pursue health guidelines that consider the state of their family (e.g., specific health guidelines for families that include a child with a chronic condition). We contribute to expanding the design lens from self-tracking to family-centered health tracking.

TummyTrials: A Feasibility Study of Using Self-Experimentation to Detect Individualized Food Triggers

Diagnostic self-tracking, the recording of personal information to diagnose or manage a health condition, is a common practice, especially for people with chronic conditions. Unfortunately, many who attempt diagnostic self tracking have trouble accomplishing their goals. People often lack knowledge and skills needed to design and conduct scientifically rigorous experiments, and current tools provide little support. To address these shortcomings and explore opportunities for diagnostic self tracking, we designed, developed, and evaluated a mobile app that applies a self experimentation framework to support patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) in identifying their personal food triggers. TummyTrials aids a person in designing, executing, and analyzing self experiments to evaluate whether a specific food triggers their symptoms. We examined the feasibility of this approach in a field study with 15 IBS patients, finding that participants could use the tool to reliably undergo a self-experiment. However, we also discovered an underlying tension between scientific validity and the lived experience of self experimentation. We discuss challenges of applying clinical research methods in everyday life, motivating a need for the design of self experimentation systems to balance rigor with the uncertainties of everyday life.

Examining Unlock Journaling with Diaries and Reminders for In Situ Self-Report in Health and Wellness

In situ self-report is widely used in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and for assessment and intervention in health and wellness. Unfortunately, it remains limited by high burdens. We examine unlock journaling as an alternative. Specifically, we build upon recent work to introduce single-slide unlock journaling gestures appropriate for health and wellness measures. We then present the first field study comparing unlock journaling with traditional diaries and notification-based reminders in self-report of health and wellness measures. We find unlock journaling is less intrusive than reminders, dramatically improves frequency of journaling, and can provide equal or better timeliness. Where appropriate to broader design needs, unlock journaling is thus an overall promising method for in situ self-report.

Locating the Internet in the Parks of Havana

Since March 2015, the public squares of Havana have been transformed from places where people stroll and children play to places where crowds gather to try to connect to the internet at all hours of the day and night. We present a field investigation of public WiFi hotspots in Havana, Cuba, and examine the possibilities of internet access these limited and expensive hotspots present to individuals, many of who are experiencing the internet for the first time. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2015-2016, we underscore the reconfigurations that have resulted from this access, as evolving internet users reconfigure their interactions with place, time, and individuals in their efforts to locate the internet. We also discuss the implications our findings have for the design of internet access interventions in Cuba and in other low-resource environments across the world, as well as the broader implications for social computing across diverse geographies.

Crowdsourcing Exercise Plans Aligned with Expert Guidelines and Everyday Constraints

Exercise plans help people implement behavior change. Crowd workers can help create exercise plans for clients, but their work may result in lower quality plans than produced by experts. We built CrowdFit, a tool that provides feedback about compliance with exercise guidelines and leverages strengths of crowdsourcing to create plans made by non-experts. We evaluated CrowdFit in a comparative study with 46 clients using exercise plans for two weeks. Clients received plans from crowd planners using CrowdFit, crowd planners without CrowdFit, or from expert planners. Compared to crowd planners not using CrowdFit, crowd planners using CrowdFit created plans that are more actionable and more aligned with exercise guidelines. Compared to experts, crowd planners created more actionable plans, and plans that are not significantly different with respect to tailoring, strength and aerobic principles. They struggled, however, to satisfy exercise requirements of amount of exercise. We discuss opportunities for designing technology supporting physical activity planning by non-experts.