People strive to obtain self-knowledge. A class of systems called personal informatics is appearing that help people collect and reflect on personal information. However, there is no comprehensive list of problems that users experience using these systems, and no guidance for making these systems more effective. To address this, we conducted surveys and interviews with people who collect and reflect on personal information. We derived a stage-based model of personal informatics systems composed of five stages (preparation, collection, integration, reflection, and action) and identified barriers in each of the stages. These stages have four essential properties: barriers cascade to later stages; they are iterative; they are user-driven and/or system-driven; and they are uni-faceted or multi-faceted. From these properties, we recommend that personal informatics systems should 1) be designed in a holistic manner across the stages; 2) allow iteration between stages; 3) apply an appropriate balance of automated technology and user control within each stage to facilitate the user experience; and 4) explore support for associating multiple facets of people's lives to enrich the value of systems.
It is useful for reviewers of economic evaluations to assess quality in a manner that is consistent and comprehensive. Checklists can allow this, but there are concerns about their reliability and how they are used in practice. We aimed to describe how checklists have been used in systematic reviews of health economic evaluations. Methods: Meta-review with snowball sampling. We compiled a list of checklists for health economic evaluations and searched for the checklists' use in systematic reviews from January 2010 to February 2018. We extracted data regarding checklists used, stated checklist function, subject area, number of reviewers, and issues expressed about checklists. Results: We found 346 systematic reviews since 2010 that used checklists to assess economic evaluations. The most common checklist in use was developed in 1996 by Drummond and Jefferson, and the most common stated use of a checklist was quality assessment. Checklists and their use varied within subject areas; 223 reviews had more than one reviewer who used the checklist. Conclusions: Use of checklists is inconsistent. Eighteen individual checklists have been used since 2010, many of which have been used in ways different from those originally intended, often without justification. Different systematic reviews in the same subject areas would benefit from using one checklist exclusively, using checklists as intended, and having 2 reviewers complete the checklist. This would increase the likelihood that results are transparent and comparable over time.
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