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Understanding my data, myself: supporting self-reflection with ubicomp technologies

Published: 17 September 2011 Publication History

Abstract

We live in a world where many kinds of data about us can be collected and more will be collected as Ubicomp technologies mature. People reflect on this data using different tools for personal informatics. However, current tools do not have sufficient understanding of users' self-reflection needs to appropriately leverage Ubicomp technologies. To design tools that effectively assist self-reflection, we need to comprehensively understand what kinds of questions people have about their data, why they ask these questions, how they answer them with current tools, and what kinds of problems they encounter. To explore this, we conducted interviews with people who use various kinds of tools for personal informatics. We found six kinds of questions that people asked about their data. We also found that certain kinds of questions are more important at certain times, which we call phases. We identified two phases of reflection: Discovery and Maintenance. We discuss the kinds of questions and the phases in detail and identify features that should be supported in personal informatics tools for which Ubicomp technologies can play an important role.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    UbiComp '11: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Ubiquitous computing
    September 2011
    668 pages
    ISBN:9781450306300
    DOI:10.1145/2030112
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 17 September 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. design features
    2. discovery
    3. personal informatics
    4. phases
    5. reflection
    6. visualizations

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    • (2024)Engagement With a Remote Symptom-Tracking Platform Among Participants With Major Depressive Disorder: Randomized Controlled TrialJMIR mHealth and uHealth10.2196/4421412(e44214)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2024
    • (2024) Domesticating algorithms through data reflectivity and user reflexivity: The metaphor of Yanghao on Xiaohongshu (RED) Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies10.1177/13548565241301146Online publication date: 17-Nov-2024
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