Activity tracking methods and motivations

A hot topic in the technology world at present is the ‘Quantified Self’. This is a movement where ordinary people seek to use information gained from recording and analysing their personal data to optimise their lives in some way. The techniques are frequently applied to improve people’s health and wellbeing, for example people can use them to help with diet, exercise, sleep optimisation, for lowering their stress levels, or to identify foods that contribute towards health conditions. An activity tracker is basically a more advanced version of the humble pedometer, and is both a common tool used by members of the quantified self community, as well the subject of the paper I read this week. In ‘Personal Tracking as Lived Informatics’, authors John Rooksby, Mattias Rost, Alistair Morrison and Matthew Chalmers explore participants motivations and methods around activity tracking through a series of interviews.

A range of reasons to use personal trackers were identified which the authors classify into five categories:

1. Directive tracking is about setting a targets and using the tracker to help you monitor your progress. Someone trying to lose weight may well adopt this strategy.
2. Documentary tracking is about monitoring activity rather than trying to change it. For example a hill walker might record how far they have walked in day, and may favour trackers with built-in GPS functionality to allow them to plot their route on a map afterwards.
3. Diagnostic tracking is used to try and reveal a connection. For example someone might track their food consumption and look for a correlation with health conditions. They might discover for example that consuming lots of dairy products makes their skin condition worse.
4. Collecting rewards is about using tracking for some competitive reason. For example many cyclists use a service called ‘strava’ and this has a leaderboard of time for certain routes. Many cyclists are motivated to cycle quickly on these sections to improve their position on the leaderboard.
5. Fetishised tracking describes people who track their data for no specific reason other than to have the data.

I think these tools have great potential to support people who are motivated to change their behaviour for the better, but I think the key is that the motivation has to come from the individual first and foremost. The paper supports this idea as it observes that people choose activity trackers to match their aspirations as opposed to developing aspirations after getting an activity tracker and discovering its functionality.

Whilst quantified self tools and techniques are already having an impact on people wanting to improve their health and wellbeing, I wanted to know if they could offer anything useful in the educational realm. This lead me to the paper ‘Applying quantified self approaches to support reflective learning’ by Verónica Rivera-Pelayo et al. This serves as a useful starting point for thinking about how self monitoring tools could support educators using reflective practice, and may influence tools which will be built in the future. I am supportive of the idea that these tools could be useful, but like with the activity tracking I think the motivation has to come from the individual to begin with.