Personal Tracking: Living by numbers or with numbers?

“Personal Tracking as Lived Informatics” is a CHI’14-paper by John Rooksby, Mattias Rost, Alistair Morrison and Matthew Chalmers from the University of Glasgow. It takes an interesting look at the current tech-usage-trend which has become popular under the notions of the “quantified self” and “personal computing”. The authors summarize the basic concept behind these buzzwords as “living by numbers” and further describe them as “to quantify and then optimize areas of one’s life” [5].

Shifting the focus

The paper doesn’t present any new technologies. Instead, it discusses an interview-based study with 22 participants using any kind of tracking technologies for health and wellbeing. The authors take a deliberate critical stance on technology-based research which often misses out the reality of how people use, adopt, appropriate and eventually give up on devices in the long run. HCI can and should look in both directions. Hence, this paper attempts a deliberate shift in focus on a technology’s embedding in every-day life without limiting it to a certain kind of device or implementation. In this way, the participants were able to report on how they integrated physical devices, apps, exergames and web applications for very diverse purposes in form of directive, documentary, diagnostic, reward-collecting and fetishized tracking.

 

 

The authors eventually introduced the term “lived informatics” to outline an alternative view emphasising the practical, prospective and emotional aspects of personal computing. Instead of reducing tracking users to quantified selves, it is about seeing them as people with different personalities, routines and motivations with technology only being part of a greater individual “praxis of living”.  In a way, the notion of “lived informatics” reminded me of a paper about empathetic design we read a couple of weeks ago. Even though this project was about creating new designs and not studying the appropriation/usage of existing ones, it also argued for a more holistic view on users and their respective context.

Do we need to see the numbers?

However, I would like to question if the quantification in personal computing necessarily has to be foregrounded in order to be a valid version of the quantified self concept. Two of the findings of Rooksby et al.’s study was that the collected data had rather short-term relevance and that some users even preferred abstract indicators over the exact data (such as the Nike fuel number which is not a directly comprehensive data value or calculation). So I think it should be also valid not only to shift the focus from the device to the user but also from the numbers to their interpretation within specific application contexts. During my literature search for additional reading I looked mainly how personal computing is used for health and wellbeing of people with special needs. I think that the quantification concept has a big potential in the field of assistive technologies. However, the main focus of the trend seems to remain on mainstream use cases and users satisfying a rather general health norm. Chronic illnesses are sometimes a topic (eg. [3] or [4]), but not disabilities.

I therefore chose a combination of two short papers which don’t consider themselves being part of personal computing even though they definitely use the same means of activity tracking:

[2] is about embedding activity trackers into the shoes of a dementia patient showing wandering behaviour. While I do find the safety monitoring feature by family and carers somewhat problematic, I do like the aspect of self-alert in case of trance. The scenario might be a bit too limited (eg. What if the person is inactive for 20 minutes out of other reasons than trance?) but in general I think it is a very positive approach to make personal computing a personal little helper which helps to maintain the patient’s autonomy.

[1] also uses in-sole activity tracking, but in this case to change the modality of motoric interaction with a digital device. Even though the target group of the paper lies on people “when the hands are busy”, this could also be very helpful for people with motoric disabilities affecting their upper extremities.

I think both instances could be interesting to discuss through the lens of lived informatics. The collected quantitative data itself might not be directly shown to the users, instead it is used either for triggering certain actions or enable alternative interaction modalities. And instead of the fetishized tracking gadget, it becomes subtly integrated into everyday objects which could also meet aesthetic preferences of individuals who often find noticeable assistive technologies stigmatising. There are of course several open (ethical) questions with the both designs, but on the other hand there are also many sensitive issues in the field of standard applications of the quantified self.

Personally, I’m quite pragmatic about personal computing. I own an activity tracker (a cheap fitbit copy from Aldi) which I use as a wristband-watch (!) as well as an indicator for the amount of physical activity over the day. At the same time, I feel quite critical about the possibilities how my data could be used in ways that I am not aware of and which I might not approve (eg. commercial interests from companies). I think (as for any technology) the pros and cons of the quantified self depend on the respective application context and therefore need to be carefully considered and discussed.

References

1. Xavier Benavides, Chang Long Zhu, Pattie Maes, and Joseph A Paradiso. 2015. KickSoul : A Wearable System for Feet Interactions with Digital Devices. UIST ’15 Adjunct Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software & Technology, 83–84.
2. Mark D Gross and Hyunjoo Oh. 2015. Awareable Steps: Functional and Fashionable Shoes for Patients with Dementia. UbiComp ’15 Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 579–583.
3. Haley Macleod, Anthony Tang, and Sheelagh Carpendale. 2013. Personal Informatics in Chronic Illness Management. Graphics Interface Conference 2013: 149–156.
4. Sun Young Park and Yunan Chen. 2015. Individual and Social Recognition : Challenges and Opportunities in Migraine Management. 1540–1551.
5. John Rooksby, Mattias Rost, Alistair Morrison, and Matthew Chalmers Chalmers. 2014. Personal tracking as lived informatics. Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems – CHI ’14: 1163–1172. http://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557039