An investigation of usage barriers for personal informatics tools

Abstract

Personal Informatics systems help people to collect their personal data over time and to reflect on it to gain self-knowledge. Li et al. [20] conducted surveys and interviews with people who currently collect and reflect on personal information. They proposed a stage-based model of personal informatics systems and identified barriers and properties in each of the stages. We have extended their work by conducting an online survey recruited from a broader population having varying levels of experience (current users, past users, those who were interested but could not get started, and potential future users) with personal informatics systems. We compare our results with the prior work of Li et al. [20] and also explore the negative side of personal informatics tools. Based on the results, we provide guidelines for developing personal informatics tools that could improve their acceptability for users.