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The purpose of this article is to examine the ways in which self-tracking data have meaning and value in and after the life of the creator, including how such data could become part of the larger historical record, curated in an institutional archive. In doing so, the article expands upon existing shared interests among researchers working in the areas of self-tracking, human–computer interaction and archival science.

A total of 18 people who had self-tracked for six months or more were recruited for the study. Participants completed a survey which gathered demographic data and characteristics vis-à-vis their self-tracking behavior. In-person semi-structured interviews were then conducted to ascertain the beliefs of the participants regarding the long-term use and value of personal quantified-self data.

The findings reveal the value that people place on self-tracking data, their thoughts on proper modes for accessing their archive once it moves from the private to the public space, and how to provide fidelity within the system such that their experiences are represented while also enabling meaning making on the part of subsequent users of the archive.

Today’s quantified-self data are generally embedded in systems that create a pipeline from the individual source to that of the corporate warehouse, bent on absorbing and extracting insight from a totality of big data. This article posits that new opportunities for knowing and for design can be revealed when a public interest rationale is appended to rich personalized collections of small data.

This paper aims to discuss research and design of learning activities involving activity tracking and wearable activity tracking technology.

Three studies are summarized as part of a program of research that sought to design new learning activities for classroom settings. The first used data from a qualitative interview study of adult athletes who self-track. The second used video excerpts from a designed learning activity with a group of fifth grade elementary students. The third study draws largely on quantitative assessment data from an activity tracking unit enactment in a rural sixth grade class.

Activity tracking appears to provide opportunities for establishing benchmarks and calibration opportunities related to intensity of physical activities. Those features of activity tracking can be leveraged to develop learning activities where elementary students discover features of data and how data are affected by different distributions. Students can show significant improvement related to statistical reasoning in classroom instructional units that centralize the use of self-tracked data.

As activity tracking is becoming a more ubiquitous practice with increased pervasiveness and familiarity with mobile and wearable technologies, this paper demonstrates a topical intersection between the information and learning sciences, illustrates how self-tracking can be recruited for instructional settings, and it discusses concerns that have emerged in the past several years as the technology related to activity tracking begins to be used for educational purposes.

Purpose: As biomedicine grants technology and quantification privileged roles in our cultural constructions of health, media and technology play an increasingly important role in mediating our everyday experiences of our bodies and may contribute to the reproduction of gendered norms.

Design: This study draws from a broad variety of disciplines to contextualize and interpret contemporary trends in self-quantification, focusing on metrics for health and fitness. I will also draw from psychology and feminist scholarship on objectification and body-surveillance.

Findings: I interpret body-tracking tools as biomedical technologies of self-surveillance that facilitate and encourage control of human bodies, while solidifying demands for standardization around neoliberal values of enhancement and optimization. I also argue that body-tracking devices reinforce and normalize the scrutiny of human bodies in ways that may reproduce and advance longstanding gender disparities in detriment of women.

Implications: A responsible conceptualization, design, implementation, and usage of health-tracking technologies requires us to recognize and better understand how technologies with widely touted benefits also have the potential to reinforce and extend inequalities, alter subjective experiences and produce damaging outcomes, especially among certain groups. I conclude by proposing some alternatives for devising technologies or encouraging practices that are sensitive to these differences and acknowledge the validity of alternative values.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the meaning of information literacy (IL) in food logging, the activity of recording food intake and monitoring weight and other health conditions that may be affected by diet, using applications (apps) accessed through mobile devices and personal computers.

Data were gathered from a small group of food logging app users through a focus group and interviews. Analysis was informed by practice theory and the growing interest in IL outside educational settings.

Food logging revolves around the epistemic modality of information, but it is the user who creates information and it is not textual. Food logging is associated with a discourse of focussing on data and downplaying the corporeal information associated with eating and its effect on the body. Social information was an important source for choosing an app, but data were rarely shared with others. Food loggers are very concerned with data quality at the point of data entry. They have a strong sense of learning about healthy eating. They were not well informed about the data privacy and access issues.

Food loggers need to be better informed about data risks around food logging.

This is the first study of food logging from an IL perspective.

Building on theoretical foundation of personal information management (PIM) in information science, this paper seeks to understand how activity tracker users manage their personal health information generated by their devices and to elucidate future activity tracking technology in support of personal health information management (PHIM). This paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors conducted a web survey study with a specific group of activity tracker users – amateur runners. This survey collected both quantitative and qualitative data on participants’ engagement with activity tracking technology, their PHIM practices with the information generated by the technology and how their needs were being met by their activity tracking technology use and PHIM practices.

Amateur runners surveyed in this study exhibit long-term engagement and frequent interaction with activity tracking technology. They also engage in PHIM practices by using a range of PHIM tools and performing various PHIM activities. Furthermore, they use activity tracking technology and engage in PHIM practices to meet various health/fitness-related needs and information needs, while some of these needs such as performance needs and overarching needs are only partially met or unmet.

This research discusses amateur runners as power users of activity tracking technology, provides timely updates to PIM and PHIM research in light of a new type of personal health information, and generates design considerations for future activity tracking technology in support of PHIM. It also brings together previously disparate research regarding everyday life PHIM in information science, human–computer interaction and health informatics.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically test whether individuals’ internal factors (prior knowledge, resources, and capability) and environmental factors (stimuli, limitation) have any influence on the development of personal health information management (PHIM) literacy skills and which constructs are statistically associated with general health-related outcomes.

Survey responses were collected from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mTurk), a crowdsourcing internet service, in December 2013. A total of 578 responses were analyzed using partial-least squares structural equation modeling technique.

The model as a whole exhibited 62.8 percent of variance in health-related outcomes. The findings suggest that prior knowledge has a direct effect on health literacy (HL) skills (H3: β=0.212, p<0.001). The PHIM stimuli (H4: β=0.475, p<0.001) have a direct impact on HL skills, and they have an indirect effect on the comprehension of stimuli (H6: β=0.526, p<0.001) through the mediator of stimuli and the knowledge variable.

One possible limitation of this study is that the study may include a highly technology literate group, as survey respondents were recruited from the online service mTurk.

The study poses implications for further research and practice. This research was an exploratory work for further model development so future studies should investigate deeper into real personal health record (PHR) user groups (e.g. patients and caregivers). For example, studies by White and Horvitz (2009a, b) conducted real-time user studies that the authors could apply to the authors’ future PHR studies. Since the findings cannot be generalizable to these specific groups, similar research may be conducted. Using caregiver groups of PHR users in comparison to patient groups could determine the similarities and differences of their PHIM activities and related outcomes for optimal design of self-care management.

Further, it is suggested to conduct large scale, real-time-based studies using a PHR transaction log analysis to achieve conclusiveness and generalizability. Additionally, future studies should address not only diverse real-time user groups, but also various PHR data sources and their presentation issues.

This study model offers an important perspective on PHIM and its causal pathway for use not only by patient educators and healthcare providers but also information providers, personal health record (PHR) system developers, and PHR users.

This paper aims to describe two themes of information and knowledge management in building corporate memory through curation in complex systems. The first theme describes the skillsets of new memory curators: curation; appraisal; strategist and manager. The second theme describes four concepts that support information management in complex systems: David Snowden’s just-in-time process; Polanyi’s personal knowing; Wenger’s transactive memory system; and David Snowden’s ASHEN database schema.

Academic journals and professional publications were analysed for educational requirements for information professionals in complex adaptive systems.

The skills described should be readily applied and useful in a complex adaptive system with the four concepts described. The four concepts displayed features indicating each separate concept could be aligned and integrated with the other concepts to create an information sharing model based on synergy between reasoning and computing.

Research is needed into the capability and potential of folksonomies using recordkeeping metadata and archival appraisal to support peer production information and communication systems.

The author has not found any research that links archival appraisal, user-generated metadata tagging, folksonomies and transactive memory systems governance policy to support digital online, co-innovation peer production.

The purpose of this paper is to report the design and implementation of the enhanced participant-driven photo elicitation method in a qualitative interview study, to assess the performance of the method to investigate a research topic in everyday life health information behaviour and to provide insights on how to effectively use this method in future research.

The author embedded the enhanced participant-driven photo elicitation in a qualitative interview study to examine people’s everyday life health information behaviour with activity tracking technology. The author assessed the types of visual data collected by the method, categories of elicitation enabled by the method and how the method contributed to key research findings of the interview study.

The enhanced participant-driven photo elicitation generated rich, unique and meaningful data that would be otherwise difficult to collect through conventional qualitative interviews. The method also elicited explanation, rationalisation and reflection during the interviews, which enriched and triangulated key research findings. This work validated the benefits of the general photo elicitation method such as aiding participants’ recall of experiences, enriching research findings and improving research validity. It also demonstrated that the enhancement techniques used in this study could generate rich and even research data across interviews.

This paper describes the design and implementation of the enhanced participant-driven photo elicitation method to augment a qualitative interview study with activity tracker users. The author provides recommendations for researchers to take full advantage of the method in future everyday life health information behaviour research.

Some of today's most widely used technologies do not seem conducive to self-care, and consequently they do not nourish us as selves. Rather, in today's most lauded sociotechnical systems, from Google search to Facebook, users' participation (free labor) is commodified and channeled into corporate profits. Users do engage in self-focused activities, such as posting selfies and status updates, but these do not have the character of self-care. This amounts to self-obsession without self-consideration. An illustration is given by comparing the early-modern artistic practice of self-portraiture with the modern-day smartphone practice of selfie-making. Self-portraiture has been shown to be conducive to self-care, whereas the selfie by and large is not. This comparison invites strategies for injecting self-care into selfie-making technology, as an entree into designing for self-care generally. These strategies include jardin secret, self-questioning, and multiplicity.