I am a PhD student at the Design Dept. - Politecnico di Milano, my research focuses on Self-tracking Wearables design processes informed by Philosophy of Technology approaches.
Last year I started tracking myself using an activity tracker (Garmin wristband) and an attention training headband (Interaxon Muse 2). I analysed the way I related to these devices and how this relationship influenced my self-perception. I am willing to share some thoughts with both amateur and expert self-trackers from this amazing community who built by themselves their devices to support the practice.
I am willing to find volunteers to share their experience in a 30-min interview.
If you can help me and are interested to take part in my research, please answer below! Or contact me at chiara.dilodovico@polimi.it.
Thank you very much in advance for your help
Any answer will be very appreciated
Chiara
Thank you very much for raising this point! Let me explain
Being a design researcher, my interest is to support designers in developing wearable technologies being aware of opportunities, limits and challenges. From March 2020 I started getting interested in wearable technologies used to carry out self-tracking practices: from biosignals and performance monitoring to self-discovery through reflection and patterns identification.
As a researcher, I firstly wanted to directly experience the effects of interacting with wearables able to track and interpret data coming from my own body. So I bought two diverse wearables to experiment:
the activity tracker smartband “vivosmart 4 by Garmin”
the EEG-powered brain-sensing headband “Muse S by Interaxon”.
I went through diverse stages of engagement: from curiosity and full interest in reaching goals and tracking various aspects of my daily journey, to disappointment and trust reduction when seeing data not corresponding to the activities I actually performed and doubt/anxiety when the device (Garmin wristband) started showing me things like 100 bpm in moments in which I was chatting with friends, chill and seated.
Going back to literature studies I discovered overlapping between my own experience and others. Specifically, I identified the following critical points:
Accuracy issues (Lazar et al., 2015)
Gap between the features desired by consumers and the capabilities of the device (Kim et al., 2016)
Unsuitable visualization and analytics tools, poor skills for analyzing data (Choe et al., 2014)
Difficulty of making meaning with ambiguous data: data doubt, hope in data, and data anxiety (Lomborg et al., 2020)
I would love to talk with people who self-build wearable technologies for self-tracking/self-discovery to understand if and how they tackled the above points in their iterative design process and experience.
I think designers could learn a lot from the QS community for their members’ attitude towards self-experimentation and their ability to work hard on making sense of quantified data.
Given these premises, I would like to learn from you!
Chiara
PS: Here are the references!
Choe, E. K., Lee, N. B., Lee, B., Pratt, W., & Kientz, J. A. (2014, April). Understanding
quantified-selfers’ practices in collecting and exploring personal data. In Proceedings of the
SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1143-1152).
Lazar, A., Koehler, C., Tanenbaum, T. J., & Nguyen, D. H. (2015, September). Why we use and abandon smart devices. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM international joint conference on pervasive and ubiquitous computing (pp. 635-646).
Kim, D. J., Lee, Y., Rho, S., & Lim, Y. K. (2016, May). Design opportunities in three stages of relationship development between users and self-tracking devices. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 699-703).
Lomborg, S., Langstrup, H., & Andersen, T. O. (2020). Interpretation as luxury: Heart patients living with data doubt, hope, and anxiety. Big Data & Society, 7(1).
