Although food journaling is understood to be both important and difficult, little work has empirically documented the specific challenges people experience with food journals. We identify key challenges in a qualitative study combining a survey of 141 current and lapsed food journalers with analysis of 5,526 posts in community forums for three mobile food journals. Analyzing themes in this data, we find and discuss barriers to reliable food entry, negative nudges caused by current techniques, and challenges with social features. Our results motivate research exploring a wider range of approaches to food journal design and technology.

We present an approach for designing self-monitoring technology called semi-automated tracking, which combines both manual and automated data collection methods. Through this approach, we aim to lower the capture burdens, collect data that is typically hard to track automatically, and promote awareness to help people achieve the goals of self-monitoring. We first specify three design considerations for semi-automated tracking-(1) data capture feasibility; (2) purpose of self-monitoring; and (3) motivation level. We then provide examples of semi-automated tracking applications in the domains of sleep, mood, and food tracking to demonstrate strategies we have developed to find the right balance between manual tracking and automated tracking, combining each of their benefits while minimizing their associated limitations.

Food choices are among the most frequent and important health decisions in everyday life, but remain notoriously difficult to capture. This work examines opportunities for lightweight photo-based capture in mobile food journals. We first report on a survey of 257 people, examining how they define healthy eating, their experiences and challenges with existing food journaling methods, and their ability to interpret nutritional information that can be captured in a food journal. We then report on interviews and a field study with 27 participants using a lightweight, photo-based food journal for between 4 to 8 weeks. We discuss mismatches between motivations and current designs, challenges of current approaches to food journaling, and opportunities for photos as an alternative to the pervasive but often inappropriate emphasis on quantitative tracking in mobile food journals.

As people continue to adopt technology-based self-tracking devices and applications, questions arise about how personal informatics tools can better support self-tracker goals. This paper extends prior work on analyzing and summarizing self-tracking data, with the goal of helping self-trackers identify more meaningful and actionable findings. We begin by surveying physical activity self-trackers to identify their goals and the factors they report influence their physical activity. We then define a cut as a subset of collected data with some shared feature, develop a set of cuts over location and physical activity data, and visualize those cuts using a variety of presentations. Finally, we conduct a month-long field deployment with participants tracking their location and physical activity data and then using our methods to examine their data. We report on participant reactions to our methods and future design opportunities suggested by our work.

Many people struggle with efforts to make healthy behavior changes, such as healthy eating. Several existing approaches promote healthy eating, but present high barriers and yield limited engagement. As a lightweight alternative approach to promoting mindful eating, we introduce and examine crumbs: daily food challenges completed by consuming one food that meets the challenge. We examine crumbs through developing and deploying the iPhone application Food4Thought. In a 3-week field study with 61 participants, crumbs supported engagement and mindfulness while offering opportunities to learn about food. Our 2×2 study compared nutrition versus non-nutrition crumbs coupled with social versus non-social features. Nutrition crumbs often felt more purposeful to participants, but non-nutrition crumbs increased mindfulness more than nutrition crumbs. Social features helped sustain engagement and were important for engagement with non-nutrition crumbs. Social features also enabled learning about the variety of foods other people use to meet a challenge.