Designing Personal Informatics Applications and Tools that Facilitate Monitoring of Behaviors

A new class of applications and web sites called personal informatics is appearing that collects personal behavioral information about users and provides access to this information to help users become more aware of their own behaviors. Interaction with personal informatics systems has two inter-dependent phases: monitoring and feedback. Users must interact with the system in at least one of the phases for users to become aware of their behavior. In my proposed work, I focus on user’s interaction with the system during the monitoring phase. The main question of my research is what are the problems with the monitoring phase of personal informatics and how can they be resolved? I explore three aspects of this question: (1) How do you reduce the burden of manual monitoring? (2) How can systems motivate manual monitoring? (3) What are the advantages and disadvantages of automated monitoring? ACM Classification: H5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation]: User Interfaces. Graphical user interfaces. General terms: Design, Human Factors