11th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare

Research Article

Understanding Self-Reflection: How People Reflect on Personal Data Through Visual Data Exploration

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1145/3154862.3154881,
        author={Eun Kyoung Choe and Bongshin Lee and Haining Zhu and Nathalie Riche and Dominikus Baur},
        title={Understanding Self-Reflection: How People Reflect on Personal Data Through Visual Data Exploration},
        proceedings={11th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={PERVASIVEHEALTH},
        year={2018},
        month={1},
        keywords={personal informatics visualization self-reflection visualization insights quantified self self-tracking health},
        doi={10.1145/3154862.3154881}
    }
    
  • Eun Kyoung Choe
    Bongshin Lee
    Haining Zhu
    Nathalie Riche
    Dominikus Baur
    Year: 2018
    Understanding Self-Reflection: How People Reflect on Personal Data Through Visual Data Exploration
    PERVASIVEHEALTH
    ACM
    DOI: 10.1145/3154862.3154881
Eun Kyoung Choe1,*, Bongshin Lee2, Haining Zhu1, Nathalie Riche2, Dominikus Baur3
  • 1: Pennsylvania State University
  • 2: Microsoft Research
  • 3: Independent Researcher
*Contact email: echoe@ist.psu.edu

Abstract

Rapid advancements in consumer technologies enable people to collect a wide range of personal data. With a proper means for people to ask questions and explore their data, longitudinal data feeds from multiple self-tracking tools pose great opportunities to foster deep self-reflection. However, most self-tracking tools lack support for self-reflection beyond providing simple feedback. Our overarching goal is to support self-trackers in reflecting on their data and gaining rich insights through visual data exploration. As a first step toward the goal, we built a web-based application called Visualized Self, and conducted an in-lab think-aloud study (N = 11) to examine how people reflect on their personal data and what types of insights they gain throughout the reflection. We discuss lessons learned from studying with Visualized Self, and suggest directions for designing visual data exploration tools for fostering self-reflection.