Towards More Meaningful Personal Tracking
Daniel Epstein, University of California, Irvine
Thursday 20th March 2025. 14:00-15:00 GMT. Online.
Personal tracking through digital technologies like pedometers, mood monitoring apps, and food journaling apps has great potential to help people begin to change their behaviors, understand their habits, connect with others and advocate for their healthcare. But in practice, they have largely failed to deliver on their promise of helping people derive value from their health and wellbeing data, with majorities abandoning tracking within weeks or even days. A core challenge is that people often view the act of tracking as a meaningless experience, finding that tracking technology prioritizes behavior change over opportunity to create other meaningful experiences through personal satisfaction, connection, and communication. In this talk, I discuss how my research group has approached understanding how to make personal tracking more meaningful, and design strategies that we think provide for more meaningful tracking experiences. I will touch on opportunities for meaningful tracking we are examining in personal, social, and clinical settings.
Speaker Bio
Daniel Epstein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine with a courtesy appointment in Computer Science. His work examines how personal tracking technology can acknowledge and account for the realities of everyday life, designing new technology and studying people’s use of current technology. Daniel has published over 40 papers in top HCI venues including CHI, Ubicomp, and CSCW, receiving multiple Best Paper awards at CHI, and an NSF CAREER award. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Washington in 2018.