Response to Li's Stage Model for Personal Informatics

Problem: there is no comprehensive list of problems that users experience towards using personal informatics systems.

Motivation: memory is limited and PI allows a more true self reflection. But how can we step it up?

Approach:

They performed a survey:

· How difficult is it to collect personal information?

· What was the initial motivation to reflect on it?

· What patterns are found when exploring personal information?

Most important areas: Finance, journaling, exercise and health.

Reasons: curiosity, interest in data, discovery of new tools, suggestion and trigger event.

Stages:

· Preparation: motivation to collect personal information, what and how they will record it.

· Collection: observations and recording of the data.

· Integration: combining and putting together all the information.

· Reflection: observing the results of the data collected, short term or long term.

· Action: what they do after they see this data -> potential behavior changes.

Contributions:

(1) Problems across Personal Informatics tools.

(2) Model that improves diagnosis, assessment and prediction of PI systems.

(3) Recommendations about how to improve existing systems and build effective personal information systems.

Thoughts:

I actually found a lot of value in the different stages, mainly because I hadn’t thought of them before. These are all things that I did when I collected my data for my infovis class. The interesting is that I don’t think we’re necessarily aware that we do these stages, or at least I never noticed when I did them. The interesting question is “what data should be collected manually vs electronically?” and to what extent can we automate it? What stage do we actually learn more from? I actually think we do still gain insight from just collecting or integrating the data, and this happened to me in one of my visualizations.