Changing Health Goals with Personal Informatics

(Personal Trackers)

read the paper

As personal trackers are being used over lifetimes, people’s motivations, values, abilities, and contexts change - and therefore their goals change as well.

How should personal trackers support people as they go through these changes?

This made us want to understand:

Background

Personal informatics

  • Tools (e.g., a smartwatch or app) that help track people their health behaviors, to learn about themselves and change health behaviors

Goal Setting

  • One of the most common techniques to support people in changing health behaviors

Goals evolve over time

As people engage in tracking and managing their health, their goals evolve in response to changing wants, needs, values, and challenges.

These changes stem from various sources, such as changes in circumstances, feelings, capabilities, or major life transitions.

If goals do not change:

  • They can become misaligned with people’s abilities, contexts, and motivations

  • This misalignment can lower confidence, hurt self-perception, and reduce long-term engagement with the tool and with personal goals

To understand how to support goal change we wanted to find out:

  1. What makes people change their health goals?

  2. How do personal trackers influence and support making decisions to change goals?

How did we conduct the study?

Survey: N=80

Survey with people who have recently changed health goals

Interviews: N=10

In-depth interviews with 10 of those participants

Conducting In-Depth Interviews

What: To conduct the interviews and support people speaking about their goal change experiences, a timeline activity was used to map out people’s goals overtime on a Miroboard.

How: We start with an overview, followed by layering information, such as specific events or learning new information, to understand interactions that affected their goals

Why: By layering participants experiences in this way, this can deepen reflection on experiences and the series of events that affected their goals.

Analysis

A thematic analysis was conducted using Atlas.ti.

People’s goals were affected by four actors (i.e., who or what influenced people’s goals) through five factors (i.e., what or how goals were influenced).

Actors

Factors

There is an interplay in how the actors and factors affect goals. Goals embody many experiences such as how:

  • Personal trackers reflect data

  • Social circles role model behavior

  • Context can cause a change in routines

  • Internal motivations are affected by achieving a goal

Often, it is not just one factor or actor to affect a goal. For instance look at the last quote: the participant’s goal was influenced by his wife who is an experienced marathon runner believing in him and supporting him in planning to his goal, which also related to him to believing in himself.

Interplay between actors and factors

What does this mean for personal trackers supporting goal change?

The Ebb and Flow of Goal Importance

  • Responsibilities, life events, and other contextual actors can take precedence over health goals

  • Changing priorities highlighted tensions between goals

Design Implications

  • Not always maintaining motivation - accommodate people’s changing priorities and life events (even through goal disengagement) (e.g., PI tool noticing and asking why is suddenly failing to achieve their goals and suggesting a way to adjust goals to their life events, and then revisiting the goal in an appropriate period.)

  • Connect goals to outcomes that are important to people (e.g., “Being more physically active means I role model healthy behaviors for my family”)

  • Highlighting creating routines people can commit to (e.g., rather than 10,000 steps a day to walking 15 minutes after every meal)

  • Positive framings towards long-term healthy lifestyles