‘One of a CHInd’; Personal Tracking as Lived Informatics – Rooksby et al (2014)

This study explores the use of activity trackers as ‘lived informatics’, positing itself in opposition to other papers on the subject. The authors found that tracking can sometimes be seen to be social and collaborative, and merely as something that people do individually. Tracking was also deemed to be mainly goal driven and used in conjunction with short term goals and on a daily basis.

Rooksby et al (2014) assert that the users of personal tracking technologies have an element of agency, and go on to say that individuals use and interpret these technologies in idiosyncratic ways. People were using technology because they wanted to change their behaviour, and not changing their behaviour because of technology. In this way it was seen as a self imposed intervention for behavioural change. Although I like the idea that technology users have a certain degree of agency and ‘choose, use, interweave and abandon’ technologies in their own way, I would argue that these behaviours are more a result of social determinism than not. I also feel that the authors positioning the ‘longstanding’ history of personal trackers in terms of personal diaries and personal computers was tenuous. This may be true to a certain degree, but I do not know that these tracking facilitators were as intervention-orientated as apps of today like MyFitnessPal.

The paper I have identified as an example of tracking and mental health (my area of research interest) is ‘Towards Smart Phone Based Monitoring of Bipolar Disorder’. The study was conducted in rural Austria with 10 patients under the supervision of a psychiatric hospital. The authors explain that as the symptoms of many mental diseases are behavioural, behaviours need to be quanitfied in order to obtain a diagnosis. The behaviours measured for diagnosis and episode prediction were movement, amount of time spent outside and number and duration of phone calls. The study (though small) was deemed successful in that the measurements acquired through the smart phone were substantiated by the psychological tests and the self-assessments by patients.

I feel that mental health is a particularly important application area for personal tracking. Often the symptoms of mental diseases are quantifiable (sleep patterns, eating changes etc) but are not reported by the patients in the information they give clinicians. This is especially significant given that when an individual is facing mental health challenges, they are often less able to acurately report their own behaviours. I think that personal tracking for mental health episode prediction and diagnosis, when used in conjunction with more traditional psychiactric methods of management, has the potential to be very effective.