Physical activity trackers rely on fixed daily step goals, treating the day as the primary unit for planning and evaluating activity. However, these goals often misalign with everyday life: schedules fluctuate, opportunities for movement vary, and long-term targets can be difficult to sustain, leading to frustration and disengagement. Despite growing evidence that short bouts of movement can meaningfully improve health, current systems provide limited support for acting on these brief, situated opportunities. This paper investigates micro-goals (i.e., brief, situated goals) as an alternative framing for supporting physical activity. We developed Mikro, a smartwatch app enabling on-the-go micro-goal setting, and deployed it in a 27-day field study with 16 participants. Our findings show that micro-goals encouraged frequent tailoring, supported immediate action, and helped participants capitalize on small opportunities for movement. We argue that micro-goals can complement daily step targets by scaffolding more flexible, adaptive, and engaging ways of staying active.

Self-tracking tools are often built around the assumption that tracking the “right” health variables will lead to actionable insights and greater control over one’s health. Yet, it remains unclear how these assumptions hold up in contexts marked by uncertainty, unpredictability, and frequent fluctuations in health needs. We explore this question in the management of enigmatic diseases—conditions such as fibromyalgia, Crohn’s disease, and endometriosis that are poorly understood and highly individualized. Through interviews with 23 participants living with disparate enigmatic conditions, we examine goals, motivations, and how tracking practices evolve across different disease states. Our findings show that tracking was strongly shaped by shifting needs, with goals emerging, evolving, or being abandoned in response to health fluctuations. Tracking was often double-edged: at times empowering, fostering a sense of control, but also frustrating, leading to self-blame and negative views of everyday activities being tracked.

People's health goals change as their contexts, needs, and values evolve. Personal informatics (PI) literature recognizes the importance of supporting goal change; however, little is known about how these tools can best support the changes people go through with their goals. To understand how PI are currently involved in goal change, we conducted a survey (N=80) and interview (N=10) study with people who had recently changed their health goals. Overall, we found that PI gave limited support to people during goal changes. Changes were driven by four actors (i.e., who and what influences the goal change): internal motivations, contexts, PI, and social surroundings. We further highlight five factors related to goal change (i.e., the ways in which the actors affect goal change): challenge, self-efficacy, changing priorities, learning, and enjoyment. We discuss how PI could better support people in goal change by considering different implementations and interactions of actors and factors.

Training Load Management (TLM) is crucial for achieving optimal athletic performance and preventing chronic sports injuries. Current sports trackers provide runners with data to manage their training load. However, little is known about the extent and the way sports trackers are used for TLM. We conducted a survey (N=249) and interviews (N=24) with runners to understand sports tracker use in TLM practices. We found that runners possess some understanding of training load and generally trust their trackers to provide accurate training load-related data. Still, they hesitate to strictly follow trackers’ suggestions in managing their training load, often relying on their intuitions and body signals to determine and adapt training plans. Our findings contribute to SportsHCI research by shedding light on how sports trackers are incorporated into TLM practices and providing implications for developing trackers that better support runners in managing their training load.

Research has extensively explored how personal informatics tools can support people's health goal setting practices. To understand the current state and reflect on the future of goal setting in personal informatics, we report the results of a scoping review of 51 papers that use and provide design implications for implementing goal setting. Our review highlights six implications for using goal setting in personal informatics tools (clarity, transparency, flexibility, framing and reframing, personalization, and reflection). We find that goal setting is becoming increasingly complex as the number of goals and their characteristics increase. We discuss these insights and point towards the importance of supporting self-efficacy during goal setting, showing adaptive goal evolution over time, reducing burden during goal setting, and framing goals to understand the complexity of health goals and support a holistic view on goal setting.

People engage in self-tracking with diverse data collection and visualisation needs and preferences. Customisable self-tracking tools offer the potential to support individualized preferences by letting people make changes to the aesthetics and functionality of tracker displays. In this paper, we use the customisation options offered by the displays of commercial fitness smartwatches as a lens to investigate when, why and how 386 self-trackers engage in customisations in their daily lives. We find that people largely customise their trackers’ display frequently, multiple times a day, or not at all, with frequent customisations reflecting situational data, aesthetic and personal meaning needs. We discuss implications for the design of tracking tools aiming to support customisation and discuss the utility of customisations towards goal scaffolding and maintaining interest in tracking.

This article presents a study of cultural differences affecting the acceptance and design preferences of social robots. Based on a survey with 794 participants from Germany and the three Arab countries of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, we discuss how culture influences the preferences for certain attributes. We look at social roles, abilities and appearance, emotional awareness and interactivity of social robots, as well as the attitude toward automation. Preferences were found to differ not only across cultures, but also within countries with similar cultural backgrounds. Our findings also show a nuanced picture of the impact of previously identified culturally variable factors, such as attitudes toward traditions and innovations. While the participants’ perspectives toward traditions and innovations varied, these factors did not fully account for the cultural variations in their perceptions of social robots. In conclusion, we believe that more real-life practices emerging from the situated use of robots should be investigated. Besides focusing on the impact of broader cultural values such as those associated with religion and traditions, future studies should examine how users interact, or avoid interaction, with robots within specific contexts of use.

While recent research has emphasized the importance of understanding the lived experience of personal tracking, very little is known about the everyday coordination between tracker use and the surrounding environment. We combine behavioral data from trackers with video recordings from wearable cameras, in an attempt to understand how usage unfolds in daily life and how it is shaped by the context of use. We recorded twelve participants' daily use of activity trackers, collecting and analyzing 244 incidents where activity trackers were used. Among our findings, tracker use was strongly driven by reflection and learning-in action, contrasting the traditional view that learning is one of deep exploration, following the collection of data on behaviors. We leverage on these insights and propose three directions for the design of activity trackers: facilitating learning through glances, providing normative feedback and facilitating micro-plans.

Recent research reveals over 70% of the usage of physical activity trackers to be driven by glances -- brief, 5-second sessions where individuals check ongoing activity levels with no further interaction. This raises a question as to how to best design glanceable behavioral feedback. We first set out to explore the design space of glanceable feedback in physical activity trackers, which resulted in 21 unique concepts and 6 design qualities: being abstract, integrating with existing activities, supporting comparisons to targets and norms, being actionable, having the capacity to lead to checking habits and to act as a proxy to further engagement. Second, we prototyped four of the concepts and deployed them in the wild to better understand how different types of glanceable behavioral feedback affect user engagement and physical activity. We found significant differences among the prototypes, all in all, highlighting the surprisingly strong effect glanceable feedback has on individuals' behaviors.

We report on a 10-month in-the-wild study of the adoption, engagement and discontinuation of an activity tracker called Habito, by a sample of 256 users who installed the tracker on their own volition. We found 'readiness' to behavior change to be a strong predictor of adoption (which ranged from 56% to 20%). Among adopters, only a third updated their daily goal, which in turn impacted their physical activity levels. The use of the tracker was dominated by glances -- brief, 5-sec sessions where users called the app to check their current activity levels with no further interaction, while users displayed true lack of interest in historical data. Textual feedback proved highly effective in fueling further engagement with the tracker as well as inducing physical activity. We propose three directions for design: designing for different levels of 'readiness', designing for multilayered and playful goal setting, and designing for sustained engagement.

Gamification, the use of game design elements, such as points, levels, badges and achievements, in non-game contexts is a promising approach for encouraging desired behaviors. In this paper we describe our design process and early evaluation of a prototype that sensed children's social interactions (i.e., physical proximity) in the playground, and attempted to encourage pro-social behaviors through motivational feedback on a public display. We illustrate how we came to realize the potentially detrimental effect of gamification on children's intrinsic motivation and depth of reflection, and how we attempted to circumvent this through encouraging empathic understanding on children regarding the consequences of their behaviors on others.

Measuring children's behaviors and experiences has been one of the core interests of the field of Child-Computer Interaction. However, maintaining children's engagement in the evaluation process is one of the challenges that researchers need to meet. In this paper we introduce Playful Booth, a system that aimed at engaging children in playful photo taking practices with the goal of capturing their social interactions over prolonged periods of time. We then present a 4-week-long deployment of Playful Booth with a total of seventy children that aimed at addressing three research questions. First, does playful booth create initial engagement on children and does it sustain this engagement over prolonged periods of time? Second, can the deployment be sustained for prolonged periods of time with minimal resources? Last, do behavioral data as captured from playful booth reflect children's actual social participation in the school community?

As HCI shifts "to the wild", in-situ methods such as Diary Methods and the Experience Sampling Method are gaining momentum. However, researchers have acknowledged the intrusiveness and lack of realism in these methods and have proposed solutions, notably through lightweight and rich media capture. In this paper we explore the concept of lifelogging as an alternative solution to these two challenges. We describe Footprint Tracker, a tool that allows the review of lifelogs with the aim to support recall and reflection over daily activities and experiences. In a field trial, we study how four different types of cues, namely visual, location, temporal and social context, trigger memories of recent events and associated emotions. We conclude with a number of implications for the design of lifelogging systems that support recall and reflection upon recent events as well as ones lying further in our past.