Revisiting personal information management through information practices with activity tracking technology

Abstract

Personal information management (PIM) is an interdisciplinary research area with established theoretical foundations from information science and applied empirical research from human-computer interaction (HCI). The increasingly popular activity tracking technology (ATT) has given rise to a new type of personal information about one's daily physical activities, which has not been scrutinized under theoretical frameworks in PIM. This article presents an in-depth qualitative interview study supplemented by participantdriven photo elicitation with 20 long-term activity tracker users about how they manage personal information generated by ATT. Key findings include the identification of two distinctive user groups (i.e., consistent casual users and powers users) among long-term activity tracker users and an in-depth portrayal of these groups' PIM behaviors with ATT. These behaviors include concurrent and subsequent PIM practices, 6 types of PIM activities, and the use of a spectrum of PIM tools. This research provides timely theoretical updates to PIM under the background of selftracking technologies, outlines empirical implications to improve ATT in support of PIM, and offers recommendations for incorporating participant-driven photo elicitation as a supplementary method for qualitative interviews in information behavior research.

The enhanced participant-driven photo elicitation method for everyday life health information behaviour research

“…I further assess how the enhanced participant-driven photo elicitation helped us arrive at and deepen these findings in Sections 5.4. More-detailed findings and further discussion of the study results can be found in a recent publication (Feng and Agosto, 2019b).…”

“…Activity tracking technology is an emerging technology that arguably revolutionises how people interact with their personal health information, which is defined in this paper as the totality of activity trackers (the devices that record data about users’ daily physical movement and other health data) and activity tracker-related health applications (the computer software that communicates data collected by activity trackers to users). Often, activity tracker users start using the technology to achieve various health or fitness goals, consisting of a significant aspect of people’s everyday life health behaviour towards better physical well-being (Feng and Agosto, 2019b). This paper outlines a qualitative interview study examining activity tracker users’ everyday life health information behaviour, with a focus on their management of the personal health information generated by the technology.…”

“…The visual data collected through the enhanced participant-driven photo elicitation is often associated with the width and depth of the research findings. The method enriched the findings by evoking thick descriptions in the interviews (Cox and Benson, 2017) across all three types of elitication sessions: explanation sessions provided necessary contexual factors for us to confidently differentiate concurrent practices and subsequent practices; rationalisation sessions helped us identify three distinctive yet interwined motivations, namely health-related needs, information needs and quantified-self needs, behind participants’ activity tracking technology use, as detailed in a recent publication (Feng and Agosto, 2019b); reflection sessions, where participants mimicked their everyday life health information behaviours, enabled us to analyse the nuances among their subsequent practices. It was my observation that participants tended to recall more details about their everyday life interactions with the technology during elicitation sessions, which confirmed the method’s ability to aid recall during interviews (Harper, 2002).…”

Exploring the topic structure and evolution of associations in information behavior research through co-word analysis

“…Massive amounts of individuals' personal information are transmitted across networked technologies such as Facebook and Twitter, for example, which is beyond individuals' control. Awareness of how people handle this personal information has gradually increased in recent years (see, for example, Feng and Denise, 2019). The problematic practices of social media, such as Facebook's invasion of personal privacy (Vishwanath et al, 2018), raise wide concerns for personal information protection, and efforts are needed in the improvement of industry practices to protect the personal information of different groups in the digital age.…”

Opportunities and challenges of self‐tracking technologies: Understanding information, technology, and users through the lens of information science

“…To facilitate meaningful personal health information management in everyday life requires a deep understanding of the interplay among activity tracking technologies themselves, the health information provided to users by the technologies, and people's everyday life health information behavior. Yuanyuan will discuss how information science researchers could integrate the personal information management (Jones, 2007) framework with human‐centered computing (Feng and Agosto, 2019) principles to investigate the opportunities and pitfalls in using activity tracking technologies for personal health information management. She will introduce her research findings that address the importance of designing non‐intrusive activity tracking technologies to encourage meaningful long‐term personal health information management in everyday life.…”