Although Personal Informatics stresses the importance of “self”-awareness and “self”-knowledge in collecting personal data, a description of the “self,” to which all these knowledge endeavors are addressed, is missing in the current debate. In this article we first review how the different theoretical assumptions that currently inform the design of Personal Informatics tools fail to convey a convincing image of the self, which ought to be quantified by these technologies. We then move on to the outline of a theory of the self that may ground the current discourse in Personal Informatics. Building on this theoretical framework, we propose a set of design guidelines as its implications, which may drive the design of future self-tracking technologies. Finally, we outline a research agenda, organized around such guidelines, in the form of research questions to be addressed in the future.

Know Thyself: A Theory of the Self for Personal Informatics

Technological advances in wearable computing are changing the sports domain. A variety of Personal Informatics (PI) tools are starting to provide support and improve athletes’ performance in many sports. In this article, we interviewed 20 amateur and elite athletes of different disciplines, using an array of PI devices, to explore how sports, as well as athletes’ experience, are affected by such instruments. We discovered that amateur athletes present different patterns of usage compared to elite ones. Moreover, we found that elite athletes make sense of their data by exploiting the knowledge they have about their own body and sports practice. We then proposed four considerations for design that we believe should be explored in the future, to reflect on how self-tracking is changing our perspective on sports, and, by and large, on our everyday life.

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Personal Informatics for Sport: Meaning, Body, and Social Relations in Amateur and Elite Athletes

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The spread of wearable technologies is paving the way for the mass-scale adoption of self-tracking instruments, which are progressively integrating into different social practices. Among these, sport seems to be a promising domain in which Personal Informatics tools can support individuals in performing their activities and in achieving their situated goals. In this article, we conducted semi-structured interviews with amateur and elite athletes to explore what they seek in their trackers, how such instruments may impact on their “mind”, by affecting their motivation and attention during workouts and races, and how sports data are intertwined with other information pertaining to their lifestyle. On the basis of these findings we discussed three themes that may be relevant for Personal Informatics, also proposing a series of implications for design that may help researchers in designing self-tracking tools for sport.

Self-tracking while doing sport: Comfort, motivation, attention and lifestyle of athletes using personal informatics tools

A Wearable Future

Personal informatics has become a widespread practice, yet even expert users still face challenges in synthesizing and making sense of data. We suggest that these challenges are related to the complexities introduced once personal context is taken seriously. Through ethnographic research in the Quantified Self community, and an iterative software design process for a project called Data Sense, we offer early indications of what those challenges are, and describe how we approached solving them. We found that users had an easier time of working with data when they could use their own files, when temporal recurrences were surfaced and reminded them of other patterns, and when they could "grab" data directly from visualizations. However, the system did require more user learning than we anticipated.

As Simple as Possible but No Simpler: Creating Flexibility in Personal Informatics

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As Simple as Possible but No Simpler: Creating Flexibility in Personal Informatics