Summary:
In this paper, Consolvo et al., discussed their findings of utilizing the UbiFit garden -- a system they designed for promoting fitness -- in the wild. A combination of a mobile phone, a sensor and an application are used in their system. As the sensor retrieves numerous types of data, they designed the application to abstract the data and present it in the form of an aesthetically visual garden. The garden also serves as positive reinforcement for a user, such that if they perform more physical activities, the garden is “brighter”. With 12 people utilizing the system, the researchers discovered some interesting facts. For one user, whose system was incorrectly working, he was frustrated he didn’t get the flower in the garden. This highlighted the “game-aspect” of the system. Additionally, they also found that users really preferred selecting their own type of information to add,edit, etc. Personalization of data was very important. Overall, the researchers got positive feedback from their system.
Response:
While this paper was primarily about the UbiFit garden implementation, it was also a commentary on activity sensing. In this implementation, with the activity sensing, I felt this was too much like a game (especially based on one of the comments from a user) and kind of super ceded the point that the point of fitness was to get fitter, not to play a game. Another important component of this system that may be generalizable was the personalization of data. Having the data be user customizable made it feel (or at least appear) to the users that the device was more a part of what they did daily rather than something they had to do. This sense of ownership I believe is important going forward with personal sensing technologies. We already see this now with things like the Nike+, which are as personal as you can get, since they are now part of clothing, etc. My only fear of technology such as this is, do we really NEED to sense every part of our lives and examine it?
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