Personal Informatics for Sport

Abstract

Technological advances in wearable computing are changing the sports domain. A variety of Personal Informatics (PI) tools are starting to provide support and improve athletes' performance in many sports. In this paper, we interviewed 20 amateur and elite athletes of different disciplines, using an array of PI devices, to explore how sports, as well as athletes' experience, are affected by such instruments. We discovered that amateur athletes present different patterns of usage compared to elite ones. Moreover, we found that elite athletes make sense of their data by exploiting the knowledge they have about their own body and sport practice. We then proposed four considerations for design that we believe should be explored in the future, to reflect on how self-tracking is changing our perspective on sports, and, by and large, on our everyday life. • Human-centered computing➝ Human computer interaction (HCI)

Information Literacy in Food and Activity Tracking Among Parkrunners, People With Type 2 Diabetes, and People With Irritable Bowel Syndrome: Exploratory Study

“…The question of how information literate trackers are (how good their critical understanding of the information they are using is) thus becomes central to effective and safe tracking. This is one of the first papers to bring this perspective on tracking explicitly to the fore and complements research that has examined self-tracking from a Human-computer interaction perspective [12,62,63], a health behavior change perspective, [3] and a sociological perspective [13].…”

“…Smartphone penetration is high, with 83% of people in the United Kingdom owning one [5] and 25% of smartphone app users regularly using a health or fitness app [6]. The act of tracking has been shown to be beneficial in terms of increasing desired behaviors in the health arena [7,8], and research has focused on the value of apps and technologies to support health goals in a variety of contexts (eg, menstrual tracking [9], management of migraines [10], diet and exercise [11,12] and chronic disease [13,14]).…”

“…However, there are a number of potential issues associated with tracking practices, including: (1) tracking can radically alter eating practices; (2) can cause a loss of pleasure in food [1]; (3) can remind people of the negative aspects of a chronic disease [13]; (4) users may fetishize data and develop unhealthy obsessions [1,12,13]; (5) apps tend to not to be based on any behavior change theory [37,38]; and (6) people can find the apps very time-consuming to use, leading to a culture of temporary use, which is particularly true if apps do not meet expectations [3,32,39]. In addition to these issues, there are a number revolving specifically around the information literacies required to make effective and safe use of tracking.…”

“…In addition, tracking devices are not necessarily scientifically reliable. They remain unregulated, and there has been considerable speculation about their accuracy [40] and the extent to which valuable bodily data cannot be recorded with apps and devices [12]. So, an information literate individual would be aware of these issues and either find ways to take them into account or not use them at all.…”

Self-Interfaces: Utilizing Real-Time Biofeedback in the Wild to Elicit Subconscious Behavior Change

“…Unlike the traditional persuasive [2] and reflective [3] behavior change technologies, if the Self-Interface signal is intuitively interpreted, it can eliminate the need for the user to actively engage with the intervention. Additionally, providing the biofeedback in real-time and in the wild can eliminate the need for external interpretation of the user data; an issue that has been addressed through research in personal informatics [7,9,10].…”