With thousands of schools and preschools closed and many states under “stay-at-home” orders to try to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, families are facing a tough situation: trying to work — possibly remotely — while simultaneously being responsible for their children’s education.

91���� researchers are beginning a national study to help families discover technology that helps them both successfully navigate home-based learning and combat social isolation.

“I think some parents had idealized scenarios where they said ‘Oh, I’ll just put my kid in front of a computer for a few hours and while I work, they’ll do math and reading,'” said co-lead researcher , a 91���� professor of human centered design and engineering. “It all sounded great, but then after one day it’s like, ‘Oh gosh, this is not going to work.'”

One major issue, the researchers said, is that it’s overwhelming trying to sort through seemingly endless technology options.

“People want to help parents manage this, and one easy way is to share resources. But in reality there are almost too many options,” Kientz said. “As a parent, I was added instantly to about five or six different Facebook groups all about trying to navigate this situation. Everyone was posting a million different resources, such as brightly colored schedules for homeschool.”

For their project, Kientz and team plan to recruit 30 diverse families with children ages 3 to 13 across the country. Participating families will be organized into three groups based on common family characteristics, such as children’s ages or work situations.

“We definitely want to include many different types of families, including parents who are still physically going to their jobs, parents who are in quarantine, intergenerational households and single parents,” Kientz said. “But we want to make sure the study itself isn’t creating more extra work for people who are already burdened.”

Each family is expected to participate for about 30 minutes a week during the 10-week study. Families will reflect on how the technology they use helps or hinders their lives.

“What we’re proposing to do here is find real stories from different types of families about what is helpful and what are the roadblocks,” Kientz said. “Then we plan to immediately share that information back out using social media and regular Medium posts. We’ll also provide a direct channel into some of the tools that support online learning, exercise and staying in touch at home.”

In the later part of the study, families will design new or redesign existing technologies — such as a new educational skill for Amazon Echo. Then the families will test simple prototypes of these designs. Most of these activities will be completed as a family, though there may be some caretaker- or child-only activities as well.

“It’s important to see things in terms of equity, too,” Kientz said. “Some people don’t have time to homeschool their kids, and a lot of these tools require high-speed internet access, iPads or other expensive equipment.”

The study will look at how families in different situations are finding tools that they are able to access and use successfully.

Kientz, who studies families and technology and is also the parent of two children ages 7 and 4, suggests the following reputable websites/apps:

• Learning
  • (note: the iPad version, , is easier for younger kids to navigate)
  • (and their remote-learning resource )
  • Preschool-aged kids iPad apps like Sago World or any app by Toca Boca.
  • Typing —
  • Coding — and /
• Staying connected with family and friends
  • Minecraft (note: families could set up Realms to create a private server for their kids to socialize with their friends)
  • Facebook’s Messenger Kids app
  • FaceTime
• Exercise
  • apps like Pokemon GO and Harry Potter Wizards Unite can make walks more entertaining (note: make sure you stay at least 6 feet away from others)
  • Freeze Dance skill on Amazon Echo
  • Just Dance for the Nintendo Switch

Additional co-lead researchers on this project are: , a 91���� associate professor of human centered design and engineering who has done similar research projects to study ; , a 91���� assistant professor in the Information School who studies families and technology; and , a 91���� assistant professor in the iSchool who works with children . Rebecca Michelson, a 91���� doctoral student in human centered design and engineering, is also a researcher on this project. This study is funded by the National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact Kientz at jkientz@uw.edu, Munson at smunson@uw.edu, Hiniker at alexisr@uw.edu and Yip at jcyip@uw.edu.

Grant number: 2027525

Fitness trackers like Fitbit and Garmin watches make it easy for anyone to collect data about health and performance.

Now college athletic programs are moving toward implementing more data-driven trackers — devices or apps that can monitor students’ heart rates, sleep or even — into their own programs to help keep their athletes as competitive and healthy as possible.

Researchers at the 91���� were concerned that this shift toward more data collection might encroach on college athletes’ autonomy. The team interviewed 22 athletes and staff members from three college athletics programs to see what data they collect and how they use it. The researchers highlighted potential tensions that might arise and made suggestions for increasing transparency to help implement tracking systems in a way that supports both athletes and staff. The team Jan. 6 at the ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work in Florida.

“We’re at this place where this technology is still in its early stages,” said co-author , a 91���� associate professor of human centered design and engineering. “People are adopting it with a lot of good intentions but not a good understanding of the technology’s limitations or how to balance the goals the technology supports with the other goals the team has or that individuals have.”

While both professional and college athletic programs track their athletes’ fitness, the researchers decided to focus on college athletes.

“They’re still learning how to manage their bodies and their sports. And then they’ve got all this other stuff to do, too,” said lead author , a 91���� doctoral student in human centered design and engineering who rowed as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “As a computer science major, I had really tough classes. It was a lot to balance with 20 or so hours of rowing each week. I think the dual demands on student-athletes are one of the things that makes this research really interesting for us.”

The researchers contacted 11 athletes and 11 staff members — sports coaches, athletic trainers, and strength and conditioning coaches — across three universities that were either Division I or Division III schools. The students and staff participated in multiple sports, including basketball, lacrosse, ice hockey, swimming and rowing. From the interviews, the researchers identified several types of data that coaches collected and determined potential tensions between staff and athletes.

Some of the findings include:

• Students weren’t always aware they were providing data. For example, coaches might acquire “wellness data” by striking up informal conversations with athletes and sharing that information with other staff members.
• Coaches didn’t always communicate how they were using the data they collected. The researchers found that their own perspectives mirrored this finding. “At the time, our swim team tracked three kinds of data: weight training data, heart rate data and time data,” said co-author , a 91���� doctoral student in human centered design and engineering who was on the swim team as an undergraduate student at Tufts University. “We got to see our data, but it was less clear how our coaching staff used it. During practice, if your heart rate was really low when it was supposed to be really high, a coach would probably tell you to work harder.”
• While athletes want to see their performance data, it might not show the whole picture of how they’re physically feeling. “I didn’t wear a tracker throughout college sports,” said Kolovson, who found her own experiences reflected in the reports from current college athletes. “But I would have loved to see that sort of information from when I was at peak rowing fitness. How stressful was it to do a 2K or a 6K? At the same time though, I feel like I was really in tune with my body as a college athlete, and perhaps as much as I would have liked to see that information, it might have taken away from my experience or my ability to be present.”
• Tracker data could infringe on an athlete’s personal sense of autonomy. “Right now the students are able to say, ‘I feel fine and I’m ready to perform today,’ even if they got three hours of sleep, which is maybe not in their best interest, but they have the choice,” Kolovson said.

Athletic staff members feel a lot of pressure to use tracker data to get a competitive edge, the researchers said. But this technology is so new that there are no best practices to follow when implementing new methods. To relieve tensions for now, the researchers suggested that staff members and athletes have conversations about tracking to figure how to support athletes without taking away their autonomy.

The researchers also suggested that tracker designers could help by changing the interface of their data management software.

“Often the coaches get a portal where they can see their athletes’ data, but the athletes don’t have a portal on their side. Or if they do, it’s to input something: They’ll get a ping about a wellness survey every morning where they have to say ‘I got X hours of sleep, I feel sore or don’t feel sore,'” Kolovson said. “But if designers could build out that portal on the athletes’ side, there is more potential for athletes to learn through self-reflection or communicate about data with the staff.”

Now the research team is working on finding ways to avoid potential pitfalls and help coaches identify reasonable goals for collecting and managing their data.

“In this context, the source of the data is the athlete’s body. It’s not like the number of points you score or your time to run a mile. All this stuff these devices can collect is more personal,” Kolovson said. “And while this process is not intending to be malicious, it’s set up in a way that augments the staff members’ position of power — they are determining how the data is collected and how the system is set up. We’re trying to make sure that people can use these systems in a way that works for everyone.”

, a 91���� associate professor of human centered design and engineering, is also a co-author on this paper. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact Munson at smunson@uw.edu, Kolovson at kolovson@uw.edu and Liang at cliang02@uw.edu.

Grant number: IIS-1553167

A personal trainer costs an average of $50 per hour, according to WebMD. Alternatives, such as low-cost or free exercise apps, may yield low-quality workouts that are not adapted to individual preferences or lifestyles — which ultimately dampen their effectiveness.

To address these shortcomings, researchers at the 91���� and Seattle University created CrowdFit, a platform for exercise planning that relies on crowdsourcing from nonexperts to create workout regimens guided by national exercise recommendations and tailored around user schedules and interests.

As the team reported in presented at the in Montreal, in a field evaluation, nonexperts could create exercise plans as effective as experts under certain conditions. In addition, CrowdFit improved the quality of exercise plans created by nonexperts. Compared to nonexpert exercise programs prepared via Google Docs, nonexpert plans created using CrowdFit featured more appropriate levels of exercise for each user, a better progression of activities from week to week, more appropriate strengthening routines and better compositions.

“Most apps available to the public offer limited ability to customize an exercise plan — criteria like goals, age and weight,” said lead author , a 91���� doctoral student in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering. “With CrowdFit, we designed greater flexibility to customize exercise plans to a user’s schedule, constraints and nuanced preferences.”

Through CrowdFit, a person who wants an exercise plan creates a personal profile on the app, listing information such as daily work schedule, interests and exercise preferences. A nonexpert then uses the profile — as well as exercise and health guidelines provided by CrowdFit — to craft a week-long exercise plan for the user. In the app, the plan is displayed as a detailed schedule, including suggestions for when to exercise, justification for the exercise choices and other information to both encourage the user and help him or her execute the plan correctly. At the end of the week, the user provides feedback, and the planner crafts an updated schedule for the next week.

“We previously saw that people can craft plans for others that are challenging and interesting, but also had shortcomings with respect to exercise science,” said senior author , a 91���� assistant professor of human centered design and engineering. “In this study, we set out to test whether supporting planners with information on exercise science and feedback from users could help them produce plans that are also high-quality in this respect.”

“By involving nonexperts in the process, there’s also an opportunity to increase these nonexperts’ exercise knowledge, ultimately benefiting not just the users, but also the planners,” said co-author , a 91���� associate professor of human centered design and engineering.

The researchers tested CrowdFit in a study of 46 subjects divided into three groups, each of which received a customized exercise plan based on a CrowdFit profile. Subjects in the first group received exercise plans crafted by nonexperts — volunteers who lacked the formal education and expertise of a personal trainer — using CrowdFit, which also contains information on exercise guidelines. The second group received exercise plans created by personal trainers, who used Google Docs to view the users’ profile information and deliver their plans. The final group received exercise plans crafted by nonexperts, again using profile information and plan delivery via Google Docs. Subjects followed their plans for one to two weeks.

Researchers interviewed the users after they had completed the study, and had exercise scientists evaluate each plan.

Overall, the exercise plans created by nonexperts were as effective as expert-prepared plans based on:

• How well they were tailored to individual needs
• The appropriateness of the intensity and duration of aerobic activity
• The balance between aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities

In addition, the CrowdFit plans crafted by nonexperts tended to be as effective as the plans crafted by professional trainers, especially for features such as incorporating basic exercise principles, creating plans that were compatible with user preferences and schedules, and incorporating sufficient aerobic activity. CrowdFit plans also were easier to understand than expert plans and met recommended exercise guidelines.

“Our study has demonstrated that nonexperts can be guided through designing an exercise plan that is consistent with national recommendations,” said co-author , an assistant professor of kinesiology at Seattle University. “There may not yet be a substitute for a trainer prompting a person through a routine on the gym floor, but the role of the expert is expanding to become more collaborative with the tech industry in guiding future design choices of apps.”

The researchers also found areas where CrowdFit performance could be improved, such as including more exercises to improve flexibility and encouraging warm-ups and cool-downs during workouts. Future versions of CrowdFit could incorporate more detailed guidelines for plan creators.

“We hope that tools like this will contribute to a common goal: to increase the adoption of lifelong exercise by all,” said Welsh.

91���� team members are part of the “Design, Use, Build” group — or . Additional co-authors are 91���� doctoral student , research associate and Diana Oviedo, a former 91���� graduate student now at Microsoft. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

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For more information, contact Agapie at eagapie@uw.edu, Hsieh at garyhs@uw.edu and Munson at smunson@uw.edu.

Grant number: IIS-1553167.

Instagram users post millions of food photos — whether to show off a sophisticated palate, make friends drool over chicken and waffles or artfully arrange colorful macarons.

A new study from 91���� researchers describes how some people also turn to posting photos on Instagram to track food intake or to be held accountable by followers in meeting healthy eating or weight loss goals.

In a to be presented at the in May, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 16 people who consistently record and share what they eat on Instagram about the benefits and challenges of using the social media platform to achieve their eating and fitness goals. The research team will use the results to inform the design of tools to support healthy behaviors.

Instead of simply using a traditional food journal or app that requires users to write down or log everything they eat, the interviewees snapped pictures of what they ate in a day — from bowls of healthy fruit to the burrito they scarfed in the car — and shared them on Instagram using the #fooddiary or #foodjournal hashtags. Some also used the photos as a reference so they could remember to log their food later in the day.

“The benefit of photos is that it’s more fun to do than taking out a booklet or typing hundreds of words of description in an app,” said lead author and 91���� human centered design and engineering doctoral student . “Plus, it’s more socially appropriate for people who are trying to track their diets to snap a photo of their plate when they’re out with friends — everyone’s doing it and it doesn’t look weird.”

Plus, having a visual account of everything one eats in a day — both in terms of volume and quality — can help people spot trouble.

“When you only have one data point for a pizza or donut, it’s easy to rationalize that away as a special occasion,” said senior author , assistant professor of human centered design and engineering at the 91����. “But when you see a whole tiled grid of them, you have to say to yourself, ‘Wait, I don’t actually have that many special days.’”

The interviewees said that social and emotional support from other Instagram users helped them stick to their own tracking and healthy eating goals, and many strove to provide that support for others. In some cases, feeling accountable to other Instagram users and followers caused people to be more honest about their eating habits. One woman who previously used the MyFitnessPal app to track her diet said she would make excuses to herself about why she didn’t need to log a bag of chips because it was so tiny.

“With Instagram, it helped me because I was taking a picture of it — it’s real and it does exist and it does count towards what I was eating. And then putting up a visual image of it really helped me stay honest,” the user said.

Because Instagram allows one to create different accounts for different purposes under the same user profile, people reported that they could easily find communities and followers with similar interests by using food tracking, weight loss or healthy eating hashtags — and could avoid overwhelming friends and family who weren’t interested in seeing pictures of everything they ate. That differs from Facebook, for instance, which doesn’t allow for multiple accounts or identities.

“With Instagram, you can have a separate part of your profile dedicated to food journaling and you don’t have to be worried that your family member or neighbor who just wants to see pictures of your dogs or vacations will be turned off,” Chung said. “It’s not funneling everything to the same channel.”

People did report some tensions between wanting to remain honest about what they ate and feeling reluctant to photograph food that would be perceived as undesirable.

But users who ultimately met their weight loss, eating or fitness goals also found that remaining on Instagram — and helping mentor and encourage others — made it easier for them to maintain their desired behaviors and to continue to be mindful about their health, the study found.

“Maintenance becomes pretty boring for a lot of people because your quest to hit a goal has worn off,” Munson said. “This made things more interesting and meaningful for people because after they got to their goal, they turned to thinking about how they could help others and stay accountable to people who were relying on them for support.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a 91���� Innovation Research Award and Microsoft.

Other co-authors are human centered design and engineering doctoral student ; Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering doctoral student and associate professor ; and Information School doctoral student , all from the 91����.

For more information, contact Chung at cfchung@uw.edu or Munson at smunson@uw.edu.

Personal tracking tools — technologies that meticulously count our daily steps, map our runs, account for each purchase – fall in and out of favor in users’ lives.

People abandon self-tracking for different reasons, 91���� researchers have found. Some don’t like what their Fitbit or financial tracking tools reveal, others find collecting data a hassle, don’t quite know how to use the information or simply learn what they need to know about their habits and move on.

“We got curious about what it’s like for people after they stop using self-tracking tools,” said , a 91���� assistant professor of human centered design and engineering. “Do they feel great, do they feel guilty, do they feel like they’ve gotten everything they need?”

In research that surveyed 193 people who had abandoned personal informatics tracking, the team found many people experienced no real difference in their lives. Other emotions, however, ranged from guilt over not being able to keep it up to relief from the tyranny of self-tracking.

Now, in a to be presented Sept. 15 at the Association for Computing Machinery’s (UbiComp 2016), the researchers explore how different design approaches may better support people who have lapsed in their Fitbit use.

“People feel more guilt when it comes to abandoning health tracking, as compared to something like location tracking, which is more of a fun thing that people do for a while and move on from,” said lead author , a 91���� doctoral student in computer science and engineering.

“We definitely don’t think that everyone should be tracking forever, but we wanted to see if there are design opportunities to better support people who have had different experiences using Fitbit.”

The research team surveyed 141 people who had lapsed in using Fitbit. They showed the subjects seven different visual representations and ways of framing previously collected data, to see if the data could offer additional support and encouragement to be healthy if portrayed in new and interesting ways.

Half of these Fitbit users described feeling guilty about their lapsed Fitbit use, and nearly all of those said they would like to return to activity tracking. Twenty-one said they got no value out of tracking, found it annoying, or struggled to connect the data to behavior change. Five participants felt they had learned enough about their habits, and 45 reported mixed feelings about abandoning their Fitbit.

The researchers found that lapsed users responded differently to seeing their old Fitbit data presented in new ways, depending on their personal tracking history.

Participants who had tracked their fitness levels for less than four months preferred visualizations that showed them which days of the week or time of day they were active, while those with a longer track record preferred visualizations that highlighted the length of their activity record.

Most people preferred social comparisons that made them look better than their peers, such as “you walked more than 70 percent of people,” over those that were framed negatively, such as “30 percent of people walked more than you” – even if the comparisons represented the same information.

The team also found that people who felt guilty about abandoning their Fitbit use were very receptive to recommendations that they return to tracking, while people who felt they had gotten what they had wanted out of self-tracking felt those same suggestions were judgmental and unhelpful.

The responses show, researchers say, that a one-size-fits-all design approach misses opportunities to support different types of users.

“Right now self-tracking apps tend to assume everyone will track forever, and that’s clearly not the case,” said co-author , a 91���� associate professor of computer science and engineering.

“Given that some people feel relief when they give it up, there may be better ways to help them get better value out of the data after they’re done, or reconnect them to the app for weeklong check-ins or periodic tune-ups that don’t presume they’ll be doing this every day for the rest of their lives.”

Co-authors include Jennifer Kang, a recent bachelors graduate from the 91����’s department of computer science and engineering and the information school, and , a postdoctoral researcher in computer science and engineering and human centered design and engineering.

The research was funded by the Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing, Nokia Research, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the National Science Foundation.

For more information, contact the authors at lapsedtracking@uw.edu.

With apps and activity trackers measuring every step people take, every morsel they eat, and each symptom or pain, patients commonly arrive at doctor’s offices armed with minutely detailed data they’ve been collecting about themselves.

Yet health care providers lack the capacity or tools to review five years of Fitbit logs or instantaneously interpret data from dozens of lifestyle, fitness or food tracking apps that a patient might have on a cell phone, according to new 91���� research.

And patients who ask providers to make sense of their self-tracked data or spreadsheets are often disappointed by the reaction — or the lack of one.

In a that won a best paper award and will be presented in March at the Association for Computing Machinery’s conference on in San Francisco, 91���� researchers surveyed 211 patients and interviewed 21 doctors, dietitians and other health care providers about their expectations for how patients’ self-tracking data should be shared and used.

“We’ve heard doctors say more and more that people bring this data into the clinic and they’re just overwhelmed by it,” said lead author , a 91���� doctoral student in Human Centered Design & Engineering.

“When you’re managing chronic disease or symptoms, day-to-day lifestyle tracking data can be useful, but doctors don’t have a way to use these data efficiently and effectively.”

The 91���� team — which includes physicians, computer scientists and engineers — is exploring ways to make self-tracking data more clinically useful and to help health care providers and patients collaboratively engage with it, including:

• Developing tools to visualize, summarize and annotate self-tracking data
• Designing methods to help analyze and explore the data
• Helping clinicians understand which tracking tools can best support different goals
• Encouraging doctors to explain how they want patients to track behaviors, and why
• Helping patients verbally explain or integrate information for their providers, rather than simply sharing raw data
• Clearly outlining expectations for how the data will be shared and used by both parties

The researchers surveyed patients and providers who manage irritable bowel syndrome or overweight and obese patients — conditions that commonly involve tracking aspects of food consumption, lifestyle behaviors and symptoms.

Providers who asked patients to keep paper diaries or suggested specific tracking tools often found the resulting information helpful in collaboratively diagnosing triggers or arriving at effective treatments.

That was largely because those providers had designed and refined those processes over time to elicit useful information and track the most relevant patient behavior. Providers also found it helpful to make notes in the patients’ paper diaries or forms, and then physically review them together. These notes also served as a record of the visit for patients after they left to go home.

Doctors reported being more challenged by data-tracking efforts that patients initiated. An app that a patient found in the Apple store, or wearable activity trackers like Fitbit or Microsoft Band suggested by a friend, may track extraneous information or summarize the data in a way that’s not relevant for that health concern.

Co-author , an attending physician and acting assistant professor in 91���� Medicine’s Division of Gastroenterology, said it’s also important that the data be credible, which requires studies or validation that show a provider that they can trust the technology’s analysis.

“As a provider you feel pressured because you want to help and interpret the data that people are bringing you, but every format is different and none of the data is validated,” Zia said.

“One thing I’d say to app developers is that there really needs to be a summary page that’s quick to look at and can be interpreted in two to five minutes. Right now patients just print out logs and that doesn’t work,” Zia said.

Patients, however, often become quite immersed in their personal data once they begin tracking it, said co-author , assistant professor of human centered design and engineering.

Patients who shared self-tracking data with providers wanted their doctors to have a complete picture of their daily life, to help them make sense of the data, to use it in developing personalized treatment plans and to be rewarded for their hard work in keeping those logs.

“Once patients start tracking data, they often see every day as a success or struggle. And people want their doctors to engage with it at that level, but that is totally impractical in the amount of time providers have,” Munson said.

But interviewees reported that showing even a little bit of personalization and responsiveness to the data — whether it was looking at reports or listening to a patient interpret what trends he or she thought were important — could help build rapport and convince patients to follow through on the provider’s advice. As one patient put it:

“He (the doctor) just skimmed through it very quickly … but it was helpful in our relationship because I have some problems that were a little different than the normal patient. … From that information, he went, ‘Oh, this is a little different, we can treat this.’ It made a substantial improvement.”

The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; Intel Corp., through its 91����-based Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing; and the National Science Foundation.

Co-authors include , a 91���� doctoral student in human centered design and engineering; , a 91���� assistant professor of family medicine; , a 91���� associate professor of computer science and engineering; and , a 91���� associate professor of human centered design and engineering.

For more information, contact Chung at cfchung@uw.edu or Munson at smunson@uw.edu.

More people are opting to use their phones as “life-logging” devices, but is the data they collect actually useful? Massive amounts of information showing your life patterns over a week, month or year are going untapped because these applications don’t have a way to interpret the data over the long term.

91���� researchers have developed visual tools to help self-trackers understand their daily activity patterns over a longer period and in more detail than current life-logging programs can offer. Their found that people generally had an easier time meeting personal fitness and activity goals when they could see their data presented in a broader, more visual way.

“Personal activity tracking is getting more robust and there are more applications to choose from, but people often don’t get any value from their data, because you can’t see it displayed over time or in a larger context,” said , a 91���� associate professor of computer science and engineering.

“We think visualizations like these are the future of how people will look back at their own data to find meaningful or actionable information.”

The research team presented its findings in June at the Association for Computing Machinery’s conference on in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Smartphone life-logging applications such as “Moves” and “Saga” that passively record location and physical activity are becoming more popular, as are other tracking tools like “FitBit,” “FourSquare,” “MyFitnessPal” and “SleepCycle.” But while these programs are useful for tracking day-to-day workouts or activities, there isn’t a way to help people pinpoint why they behave the way they do or what, specifically, they might do differently to meet their goals.

The 91���� team wants to anticipate what people want and need from these tools, and develop ways to provide them with insights into their behavior and factors that affect it.

“This is about learning how people want to engage with their data,” said , an assistant professor of human centered design and engineering. “We really wanted to target a much more casual audience with this study because these tools are becoming much more common.”

For the study, 14 West Coast participants ages 23 to 66 used the “Moves” application – recently acquired by Facebook – on their smartphones for one month last summer, passively recording types of activities and locations visited. During the month, the researchers interviewed participants several times about their preferences and ease of use.

Afterward, the researchers sliced into the data generated by each person to pull out “cuts,” or subsets, to help participants explore their data and discover trends. Examples are the type of transportation chosen based on trip distance, or the average work commute time based on the weather that day.

They then displayed these relationships through a series of visualizations, including graphs, tables and maps.

All of the participants found the information to be more helpful in achieving fitness and activity goals than if they simply used the smartphone app.

“Discovery about your patterns and habits happens when you see something you weren’t expecting to see,” said , a 91���� doctoral student in computer science and engineering. “Some participants already had an intuition about patterns in their lives, but it hit home for them when we started showing the supporting data to them in a visual way.”

For example, one participant realized that if a destination was more than 3 miles away, she usually opted to drive instead of walk. Another realized that Tuesdays were by far his most active day of the week, prompting him to think about what promoted that behavior on Tuesdays.

The researchers hope these findings will influence the data analysis capabilities of life-logging applications. They have plans to develop tools that target specific aspects of a person’s life, including reaching step goals and making healthy food choices.

Other team members are , a 91���� doctoral student in computer science and engineering, and , a former 91���� post-doctoral researcher who is now at Google.

The research was funded by the and the at the 91����.

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For more information, contact Fogarty at jfogarty@cs.washington.edu and Munson at smunson@uw.edu.