Abstract
Nowadays Personal Informatics (PI) devices are used for sensing and saving personal data, everywhere and at any time, helping people improve their lives by highlighting areas of good and bad performances and providing a general awareness of different levels of conduct. However, not all these data are suitable to be automatically collected. This is especially true for emotions and mood. Moreover, users without experience in self-tracking may have a misperception of PI applications’ limits and potentialities. We believe that current PI tools are not designed with enough understanding of such users’ needs, desires, and problems they may encounter in their everyday lives. We designed and prototype the Mood TUI (Tangible User Interface), a PI tool that supports the self-reporting of mood data using a tangible interface. The platform is able to gather six different mood states and it was tested through several participatory design sessions in a secondary/high school. The solution proposed allows gathering mood values in an amusing, simple, and appealing way. Users appreciated the prototypes, suggesting several possible improvements as well as ideas on how to use the prototype in similar or totally different contexts, and giving us hints for future research.
Highlights
Quantified self (QS), known as Personal Informatics (PI), is the concept of tracking, recording, and analyzing any kind of biological, physical, behavioral, or environmental information about ourselves in order to find previously unknown patterns [1,2]
U09 at the end of his session (S2), declared, in private, that he has suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); in the previous years he had mood-related disorders and had to keep track of his mood throughout all the day
He would be very interested in testing our Mood Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) for collecting data
Summary
Quantified self (QS), known as Personal Informatics (PI), is the concept of tracking, recording, and analyzing any kind of biological, physical, behavioral, or environmental information about ourselves in order to find previously unknown patterns [1,2]. Thanks to smartphones and tracking devices, everyone can collect and monitor traits of “the self” at every time and everywhere:. A self-tracker can use a PI system to acquire data on parameters of interest. In the U.S.A., 60% of adults monitor some personal factors like weight, diet, or athletics, while 33% observe other parameters such as sleep patterns, blood pressure, blood sugar, or headaches [3,4]. 27% of Internet users track health data online [5], 9% have decided to receive messages that refer to health alerts [6], and the number of health apps continues to increase. There are more than 40,000 available; less than 1% have been evaluated scientifically [4]
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