Position Paper on Using Contextual Information to Improve Awareness of Physical Activity

Sedentary people have a hard time incorporating physical activity into their lives. Most physical activity monitoring systems focus on performance numbers. However, people need information beyond performance numbers to help them understand how their lifestyle affects how physically active they are. The main question of our research is how people can use contextual information from ubiquitous computing systems to help with awareness of how different aspects of one’s daily life affects physical activity. We explore three aspects of this question: (1) What are the benefits of contextual information on becoming aware of behavior that affects physical activity? (2) How can we ease the burden of manually recording contextual information? (3) What are the advantages and disadvantages to learning about one’s own behavior when contextual information is automatically recorded? We discuss lessons and future work in this area. Keywords-awareness; monitoring; physical activity; context; visualizations; interviews; field study