CHI 2010 WORKSHOP

Personal Informatics and HCI Ian Li

Anind Dey
Know Thyself: Monitoring and Reflecting on Facets of One’s Life Jodi Forlizzi

Introduction
People strive to gain better knowledge of themselves by collecting information
about their behaviors, habits, and thoughts. Personal informatics systems facili-
tates the collection and reflection on personal information. This workshop brought
together researchers in a wide range of disciplines to discuss challenges and ex-
plore opportunities for HCI in the field of personal informatics. We identified tech-
nical and design issues. We discussed the benefits of reflecting on information
about different facets of one's life, such as increased self-awareness, holistic en-
gagement with life, and achievement of life balance. Key research areas include: Web http://personalinformatics.org/chi2010/
ubiquitous computing, life logging, visualizations, persuasive technologies, interac-
tion design, and the psychology of self-knowledge and self-awareness. Blog http://blog.personalinformatics.org/
Forum http://personalinformatics.ning.com/
Personal Informatics Challenges
Collection Reflection Collection–Reflection
Perceived cost/benefits for the user Cheaper configurable hardware Active vs. passive Creating narratives from data
Recording everything & filtering Accuracy of sensory input User vs designer perspective Motivation for collection
How to use collection tools Reliability of sensors What is the value of reflection? Difficulty of aggregating data
What is your target group? Lifetime of battery Reflection to express oneself Uses of data (e.g., productivity)
Viewing content for digital artifacts Easy to use, wearable, non-intrusive Authenticity and confrontation Experts vs. novices
Managing different data formats Real-time vs delayed Social aspects and sharing of data Creating readable visualizations?
Generalization from different inputs Local vs. remote log Going beyond personal reflection What would drive self-reflection
Differences in interest in data

Brainstorming Personal Informatics Systems

Idea 1 Idea 3
Knowing yourself through the mirror of others Watch your Google searches along changing context
Collection: Manual vs automatic, anonymous, collection of photos, tags, notes, Watch the searches and derive higher-level context from what is searched
environmental and context sensors (sound, gaze, smells, light) that enable recon-
struct world as seen from my point of view
Reflection: Health? starting conversation with somebody else sharing same Idea 4
point of view as me, public displays, enabling self-discovery and strengthening Quantifying user-generated metrics and sharing with
relationships in community (neighbors, family, friends)
social network
Idea 2 Enable user to abstract from (raw) data

Watching my media consumption as a reflection User defines metrics

on my social life Selective granularities of information with selected groups of people

TV / live / recorded / different genres
Who? On which devices? With whom? Where? When?
We may need different levels of metadata collected during consumption: explicit
info, tagged by producer, by system, re-blogged in channels
We may need different pattern recognition techniques to derive sensible metadata
We may derive novel information about ourselves e.g. media consumption anxiety
Score everything with points (user-defined); make it a game
Normalize metrics across users (maybe with help from others)
Facilitate comparison of performance
Make applications in different domains (e.g., energy consumption, nutrition tracking, stress level tracking)
Identify possible ‘changes’ (action points), face challenges to score points!
Implement system as a continuos loop of collection-reflection

Participants Visitors
Dominikus Baur Sudheendra Hangal Zachary Pousman Edison Thomaz
Matthias Betz Youn-kyung Lim Thorsten Prante Katarzyna Wac
Joshua B. Gross Zhicheng Liu Reza Rawassizadeh
Norbert Gyorbiro Yevgeniy Medynskiy Pedro Sanches
Jonna Hakkila Brennan Moore Nathan Yau