The research community on the study and design of systems for personal informatics has grown over the past decade. To take stock of what the topics the field has studied and methods the field has used, we map and label 523 publications from ACM's library, IEEE Xplore, and PubMed. We surface that the literature has focused on studying and designing for health and wellness domains, an emphasis on understanding and overcoming barriers to data collection and reflection, and progressively fewer contributions involving artifacts being made. Our mapping review suggests directions future research could explore, such as identifying and resolving barriers to tracking stages beyond collection and reflection, engaging more with domain experts, and further discussing the privacy and ethical concerns around tracked data.

Infertility is a global health concern that affects countless couples trying to conceive a child. Effective fertility treatment requires continuous monitoring of a wide range of health indicators through self-tracking. The process of collecting and interpreting data and information about fertility is complex, and much of the burden falls on women. In this study, we analyzed patient-generated content in a popular online health community dedicated to fertility issues. The objective was to understand the process in which women engage in tracking relevant information, and the challenges they face. Leveraging the Personal Informatics Model, we describe women's self-tracking experiences during their fertility cycles. We discuss how a complex and highly personalized context leads to responsibility, pressure, and emotional burden on women performing self-tracking activities, as well as the role of collaboration in creating individualized solutions. Finally, we provide implications for technologies aiming to support women with fertility care needs.

Personal informatics tools can help users self-reflect on their experiences. When reflective thought occurs, it sometimes leads to negative thought and emotion cycles. To help explain these cycles, we draw from Psychology to introduce the concept of rumination—anxious, perseverative cognition focused on negative aspects of the self—as a result of engaging with personal data. Rumination is an important concept for the Human Computer Interaction community because it can negatively affect users’ well-being and lead to maladaptive use. Thus, preventing and mitigating rumination is beneficial. In this conceptual paper, we differentiate reflection from rumination. We also explain how self-tracking technologies may inadvertently lead to rumination and the implications this has for design. Our goal is to expand self-tracking research by discussing these negative cycles and encourage researchers to consider rumination when studying, designing, and promoting tools to prevent adverse unintended consequences among users.

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Self-tracking data is often seen as a means to reflect and achieve a goal, usually focusing on positive insights and actions. Lately, some studies have discussed the negative consequences of self-tracking, suggesting that people interact with personal data in different ways. We explored how self-tracking activities and the emotional context characterize how people engage with personal health data through the analysis of a complex and emotionally-loaded use case: fertility self-tracking. We qualitatively analyzed patient-generated content in an online health community dedicated to fertility. We found five distinct types of engagement with data: positive, burdened, obsessive, trapped, and abandoning. Each of them is composed of an action and an emotional component that mutually influence each other. We discuss how the interplay of these components characterize a person's engagement with data, how the online forum made these issues visible, and how they are embedded in the self-tracking culture. We also provide insights into the implications of these issues for self-tracking tools. Finally, we hypothesize how people transition through the types of relationships with data, suggesting directions for future research in the area.