Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Exploring Ubiquitous Artifacts for Health Tracking

Abstract

While fitness trackers are increasingly popular among users, recent studies have shown that the health benefits of wearing a tracker are not apparent. The need to explicitly retrieve data can lead to limited benefits. Understanding how users can access, understand, and reflect on their data can lead to building systems that benefit our wellbeing. In this work, we explore the feasibility of using ubiquitous artifacts for unobtrusive feedback in health tracking. We evaluated a concept based on design dimensions for personal visualization on a smart mirror in a user study. Our design puts emphasis on the temporality of presented data. Participants found the visualizations comprehensive, rating cardiac and inertial data most useful as well as approved the different levels of temporal aggregation. Our work contributes findings on how to represent health-related data with ubiquitous artifacts to increase users’ awareness.