Sharing Automatically Tracked Activity Data: Implications for Therapists and People with Mobility Impairments

The ability to share automatically tracked health and fitness behaviors has yielded benefits ranging from increasing user motivation to providing therapists with greater insight into their patients’ progress. While past work on sharing this data has primarily focused on users with typical motor abilities, features are now emerging in mainstream tracking technologies to extend to people with mobility impairments (e.g., tracking wheelchair rolling). This paper explores opportunities specifically for users with mobility impairments to share this automatically tracked data both with peers and with physical, occupational or recreational therapists. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 therapists and 10 people with mobility impairments. The interviews focused on current and desired activity-tracking and sharing practices, and included a design probe activity to more concretely assess the perceived utility of sharing tracked fitness data. We report on attitudes and concerns toward sharing fitness data from the perspective of therapists and people with mobility impairments as well as outline design opportunities to explore in future work.