CHI 2014

Understanding Quantified-Selfers’ Practices in

Collecting and Exploring Personal Data

Eun Kyoung Choe, University of Washington, USA

Nicole B. Lee, Bongshin Lee / Microsoft, USA
Wanda Pratt, Julie A. Kientz / University of Washington, USA

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 1

 Countless Self-monitoring Apps

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 2

 Activity Sensing

Blood pressure monitor

Heart Rate monitor

Blood glucose meter Thermometer Medical Sensing

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 3
 Apple’s Healthbook

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 4

 Few good self-monitoring tools exist

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 5

 Extreme self-trackers
Activity Sleep

Location
Heart rate

Mood
Food

Home energy use Snoring

Weight Cognitive performance

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 7

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 8
Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 9
 1. What I did

2. How I did it

3. What I learned

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 10

 What do we want to know about QS?

Profile Motivation Tools

Challenges Workarounds Visualizations

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 11

 Dataset
Number of Video Posts in the Quantified Self Blog per year

# of 80"
Video Posts
60"

40"

20"

0"

2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Year

(Jan-April)

83 Video
Recordings

52 videos met the inclusion criteria

Average length: 15 minutes 53 seconds

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 12

 Analysis

Affinity analysis

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 13

 Analysis

Created a profile for each speaker

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 14

 Analysis

Categorize visualizations by type

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 15

 Results

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 16

 Profiles
1. What did you do? Items Tracked
Motivations to Practice Self-Tracking

Data Collection & Exploration Tools

2. How did you do it? Visualization Types
Building Custom Tools
Self-Experimentation

Gained Insights
3. What did you learn? Tracking Outcomes

Challenges and Workarounds1,2,3

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 17

 1. What did you do?

Items Tracked
Number of People Who Tracked A Certain Item

Top 5 items: activity, food, weight, sleep, and mood

# of people
25"

20"

15"

10"

5"

0"
What people track

Other items: cognitive performance, blood glucose, location, heart rate,

knowledge, stress, body fat, productivity, snoring, movies, posture, medicine,
skin condition, home energy usage, clothes, and public transit usage

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 18

 “Movies seen in theaters (since 2001)”
Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 19
 “Clothing logs”

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 20

 1. What did you do?

Titles of the talk:

A Diabetic Experience with Self-Quantification
Analyzing My Cancer Data
Going Vegan in December
Improving Skin Health…
Cognitive Performance
15 Weeks of Self-Tracking
Diabetes, Exercise, and QS
Experience Sampling of My Stress
Hacking Your Subconscious Mind
…

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 21

 1. What did you do?

Motivations to Self-Tracking
Motivations Sub-categories
To improve health To cure or manage a condition
To achieve a goal
To find triggers
To answer a specific question
To identify relationships
To execute a treatment plan
To make better health decisions
To find balance

To improve other aspects To maximize work performance

of life To be mindful

To find new life To satisfy curiosity and have fun

experiences To explore new things
To learn something interesting

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 23

 2. How did you do it?

Data Collection and Exploration Tools

Data Collection Tool % (#) Data Exploration Tool % (#)

Commercial hardware 56% (29) Spreadsheet 44% (23)
Spreadsheet 40% (21) Custom software 35% (18)
Custom software 21% (11) Commercial website 27% (14)
Pen and paper 21% (11) Commercial software 12% (6)
Commercial software 19% (10) Open-source platform 8% (4)
Commercial website 10% (5) Statistical software 4% (2)
Camera 6% (3) Pen and paper 2% (1)
Open-source platform 6% (3)
Custom hardware 4% (2)
Other 10% (5)

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 24

 2. How did you do it?

Building custom tools

Captures smile via wearable sensing Captures snoring via mobile app
Provides real-time feedback Provides data visualization

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 25

 2. How did you do it?

Visualization Types
Tag cloud showing the usage frequency of 21 unique visualization types

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 26

 2. How did you do it?

Custom visualizations

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 27

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 28
 2. How did you do it?

Why build custom tools?

Desirable features are not supported
Collect and reflect on the data using a single tool
Perform self-experimentation

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 29

 Challenges
& Workarounds

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 30

 Challenges & Workarounds

Tracking too many things

“I can honestly say that I’ve made the classic newbie self-tracking
mistake which is that I track everything. I didn't know exactly what to
track, so I tracked caffeine, dairy, wheat, sugar, nuts, fruit, vegetables,
meat, chicken, fish, alcohol supplements…”

Ways to lower the manual capture burden:

-  lower the data granularity (e.g., binary rather than numeric )
-  make manual capture very easy (e.g., single-tap)
-  make tracking a rewarding experience

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 31

 Challenges & Workarounds

Not tracking triggers & context

“I was trying to track all these symptoms and I was completely
ignoring the cause…”

Not having enough clues on what to track

Missing vital information on how to improve outcome measure

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 32

 Challenges & Workarounds

Lacking scientific rigor

Conducted self-experimentations without having a control
condition or controlling for confounding factors

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 33

 Implications for self-tracking tools

Help identify what to track and provide early feedback

Help people conduct more rigorous self-experimentation
Maximize the benefits of manual tracking

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 34

 Takeaways

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 35

 http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 36

Support self-reflection

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 37

 Thank you!

Eun Kyoung Choe (eunky@uw.edu)

students.washington.edu/eunky

Funding:
Intel ISTC Pervasive Computing
Google

Eun Kyoung Choe | CHI 2014 38