Help me help you: Shared reflection for personal data

Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Publication Date

11-2016

Abstract

Dramatic advances in sensor and computing miniaturization for personal data collection are making Personal Informatics (PI) tools a reality. Yet, advances in data collection have not been matched with similar advances in tools to promote, support, and facilitate reflection on this data. This gap leaves people with large swaths of data, but very little understanding of how to make sense of the data or to derive actionable insights. In this work, we explore a process called shared reflection, where individuals are paired with other data collectors, and asked (through prompts) to reflect on one another’s data. Based on a six-week study where 15 participants collected different kinds of personal data and engaged in a shared reflection process, we show that participants gained transformative insights from others’ reflections on their data. While this was promising, we discuss practical challenges in deploying this idea into real world personal informatics tools. In particular, while shared reflection can be appropriated to effectively bootstrap reflection on one’s data, this needs to be balanced against privacy and control concerns.

Keywords

Personal data analytics, Personal informatics, Reflection, Shared reflection

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work, Florida, United States, November 13-16

First Page

99

Last Page

109

ISBN

9781450342766

Identifier

10.1145/2957276.2957293

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/2957276.2957293

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