UCLIC Research Seminar Series

Self-tracking is for many people an important part of understanding and managing their health and wellbeing. However, predefined self-tracking approaches can impede people's self-care agency. In this talk, I will share the findings of our recent CHI paper that addresses this issue. We investigated a customisable and pictorial self-tracking approach in multiple sclerosis self-management by implementing and conducting a field study of Trackly, a prototype app that supports people in defining and colouring pictorial trackers, such as body shapes. We found that participants utilised the elements of Trackly designed to support agentive behaviour: they defined personally meaningful tracking parameters in their own words, and particularly valued being able to flexibly colour in and make sense of their pictorial trackers. Having been able to support their individual self-care intentions with Trackly, participants reported a spectrum of interrelated experiences of agency, including ownership, identity, awareness, mindfulness, and control. Our findings demonstrate the importance of supporting people's individual needs and creative capacities to foster mindful and personally meaningful engagement with their health and wellbeing data.

Key Papers
Amid Ayobi, Paul Marshall, and Anna L. Cox. 2020. Trackly: A Customisable and Pictorial Self-Tracking App to Support Agency in Multiple Sclerosis Self-Care. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1-15. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376809
Amid Ayobi, Tobias Sonne, Paul Marshall, and Anna L. Cox. 2018. Flexible and Mindful Self-Tracking: Design Implications from Paper Bullet Journals. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 28, 1-14. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173602
Amid Ayobi, Paul Marshall, Anna L. Cox, and Yunan Chen. 2017. Quantifying the Body and Caring for the Mind: Self-Tracking in Multiple Sclerosis. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 6889-6901. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025869