Have you thought about tracking your behaviors—such as sleep, activity level, or food—to learn something interesting about yourself? Self-monitoring is a powerful means for self-reflection, which is important in health behavior change. More recently, researchers and companies began to offer numerous self-monitoring tools to support individual’s tracking practices. However, people—even tracking experts such as Quantified-Selfers—have difficulty with continued tracking and gaining insights from their personal data. In this presentation, I will discuss my research on how we can successfully design self-monitoring tools to help people collect data easily, learn their behavioral patterns, and develop positive changes for improving health. Self-monitoring tools have particular implications for consumer health informatics such that they could empower patients, increase people’s self-efficacy, and benefit patient-doctor communication.

Eun Kyoung Choe is an assistant professor at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. Her primary research areas are in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Health Informatics. Her research focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating technology to promote healthy sleep behaviors and physical activities. Her work has been published at Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp), and American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). She is a recepient of a best paper award (UbiComp 2012) and honorable mention awards (CHI 2014; UbiComp 2012). In 2013, she was honored as a Google Anita Borg Scholar. She received her Ph.D. degree in Information Science from University of Washington, MS degree in Information Management and Systems from University of California, Berkeley and BS degree in Industrial Design from KAIST. Visit https://faculty.ist.psu.edu/choe/index.html for more information.