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Harnessing Long Term Physical Activity Data—How Long-term Trackers Use Data and How an Adherence-based Interface Supports New Insights

Published: 30 June 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Increasingly, people are amassing long term physical activity data which could play an important role for reflection. However, it is not clear if and how existing trackers use their long term data and incomplete data is a potential challenge. We introduced the notion of adherence to design iStuckWithIt, a custom calendar display that integrates and embeds daily adherence (days with data and days without), hourly adherence (hours of wear each day) and goal adherence (days people achieved their activity goals). Our study of 21 long term FitBit users (average: 23 months, 17 over 1 year) began with an interview about their use and knowledge of long term physical activity data followed by a think-aloud use of iStuckWithIt and a post-interview. Our participants gained new insights about their wearing patterns and they could then use this to overcome problems of missing data, to gain insights about their physical activity and goal achievement. This work makes two main contributions: new understanding of the ways that long term trackers have used and understand their data; the design and evaluation of iStuckWithIt demonstrating that people can gain new insights through designs that embed daily, hourly adherence data with goal adherence.

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      cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
      Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies  Volume 1, Issue 2
      June 2017
      665 pages
      EISSN:2474-9567
      DOI:10.1145/3120957
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 30 June 2017
      Accepted: 01 June 2017
      Revised: 01 April 2017
      Received: 01 February 2017
      Published in IMWUT Volume 1, Issue 2

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      Author Tags

      1. daily adherence
      2. goal adherence
      3. hourly adherence
      4. long term physical activity data
      5. physical activity trackers

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