Response: Stage Model for Personal Informatics

Summary:

In this paper, the authors discuss about how to address problems that come across with people using Personal Informatics which are not fully understood or defined, and finding a way of setting up PI that patterns with what people typically do. To do so, they did a survey.

The survey focused on how difficult it is to collect personal data, what is the motivation for reflection, and what patterns were found during exploration of the information.

From the survey, they came out with different stages to PI: Preparation, Collection, Integration, Reflection, Action.

This staged-model improved on PI assessment; what current PI systems can improve on, and what future systems should have to be effective.

Reflection:

What I find interesting in this paper is that based on my personal experience with collecting personal data, the stages are quite real. However, some stages need not be linear. For example, when you are collecting data manually, you may actually skip integration and immediately do some reflection and action.

I believe each person will be able to learn something about their data in each stages so if we have PI systems that actually allow people to do each of the stages in a non-tedious way, people will get more from their personal data.

I also think that we should have a degree of automation and experience-sampling (manual) together in PI systems.