The document discusses the Quantified Self movement, which involves self-tracking of metrics like health, mood, productivity, etc. using sensors and apps. It notes the diverse range of topics and collaborative nature. Key points discussed include the history and growth of the movement, various sensors available, framing data collection as experimental interventions to better understand behavior, and challenges around motivating participants and designing meaningful experiments.

1. Interaction Design for
The Quantified Self
CS547 PCD Oct 14, 2011
Paul Whitmore Sas
paulsas@xpcxpts.com

2. What is the Quantified Self?
Initially, it looked like “Lifelogging”
Wikipedia even today redirects from Quantified Self
to

3. Quantified Self ≠ Lifelogging
Amazing range of sensors/tracking mechanisms
Topics quite diverse
Medicine (illness) & also Wellness
Biohacking (e.g., personal genomics)
Productivity (RescueTime)
Social Dynamics (Rypple)
Mood, Money, More
Collaborative (PatientsLikeMe; Asthmapolis)
Experimental slant rather than just logging data

4. Quantified Self, a Brief History
First meetup: Kevin Kelly’s home in Pacifica Sept ’08
28 people (I wasn’t there)
Each meetup has drawn a larger crowd
The community’s mojo has been worked on by
hosting in diverse spaces (IDEO, The TechShop, IFTF)
Brilliant community director: Alexandra Carmichael
Quickly spread (NY, Boston, now 20+ in US, Europe,
Australia, S. Africa)
1st Conference: Computer History Museum May ’11
It seems to be quite sexy

5. Sensors Available to the Community
Activity Trackers (FitBit, Nike+, and others)
Bodymedia: a fairly sophisticated
device retailing for ~$150

6. A Few Additional Examples of Tracking Devices
Dedicated Sleep Trackers, such as Zeo
Headband + Display.
Tracks REM, deep sleep, disruptions
Withings WiFi Bodyscale
Measures weight & body fat/BMI
GreenGoose
RFIDs in stickers that can measure arbitrary movements, such as
whether you move your toothbrush back and forth
6

7. Smart Phones are becoming scary Smart
Instant Heart Rate
7

8. Smart Phones are becoming scary Smart part II
Apple Patent Application from 2009
“An earbud could include infrared photodetectors
to measure body temperature, heat flux
& heart rate”
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/19/apple_investigates_space_age_fitness_tracking_technology.html
8

9. Range of Tracking Devices and Methods
Food 50 203 Web apps
Fitness 118 166 iPhone
Medicine 48 77 Android
Sleep 30
Mood 54
Location 55
Free 315
$1 to $10 90
$10 to $100 101
over $100 61
9
source http://quantifiedself.com/guide/

10. QSelf primarily dominated by focus on tools &
techniques
It’s worth noting that currently, most QSelf participants are:
Exceptionally motivated - “Narcissism of All My Bits”
Engineer-ish & Entrepreneurial in outlook
Data Nudists
Frequently managing chronic conditions

11. Tools & techniques are raw material for
Interaction Design
Many QSelf tools
remind me of the
As Seen On TV
exercise products
which promise to
“completely
replace your gym.”
(i.e., just add motivation)

12. Behavioral economists view Designers/Product Managers as
CHOICE ARCHITECTS
Opt
ion
A
Opt
ion
B
“Many features, noticed and unnoticed, can influence decisions. The
person who creates that environment is, in our terminology, a
choice architect.” (Thaler & Sunstein)
6

13. “Framing” is the Psychological Bridge to Behavioral Economics
Contextual cues, situational aspects, environmental associations
shape/structure perception
4

14. Channel Factors
Persuasion not as important as removing behavioral barriers
WWII sale of bonds (Cartwright, 1949)
Tetanus shot messaging
Biggest impact (10X): providing a map to clinic + specifying appt time
Once this was seen to be “applied,” psych research stopped.
Now this work takes place as “behavioral economics”
Well-chosen defaults (opt-out vs opt-in)
Reduction in choice overload
14

15. Psychological principles for Interaction Design
Sheena Iyengar demonstrated that increased choice
reduces action
! Draeger’s Experiment with 6 vs 24 jams
! Action when only 6 choices 10X higher than 24 choices
Eldar Shafir has shown that irrelevant information can still
paralyze decisionmakers
! Willingness to pay to delay choice - 62%
Roy Baumeister’s research shows that deliberating, making
choices, and resisting temptation lead to “decision fatigue”

16. Complexity Reduction is Interaction Design
Even good sites (e.g., Mint.com) front-load cognitively
demanding & emotionally challenging tasks

17. Asking people about their goals is tricky
When asked to describe
personal priorities,
people provide more
articulate & explicit
goals for lower
priorities
Delmore Effect - http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~wit/PhDraft.pdf

18. Eliciting Goals that Matter
Recalling past
successes just
makes it worse
Distracting people
by asking them to
think about
irrelevant topics
doesn’t help
either
15

19. Recalling a success, not connected to most important goal,
can help
Relevance to Interaction Designers:
1- Accumulate information without deliberate action
2- Enable answers to “quiz”-like questions to create small successes that can
build greater engagement w/o triggering anxiety
16

20. Don’t Assume Participants Know Themselves
Choosing for tonight Choosing for next Choosing for second
Thursday Thursday
Next week I will want things that are good for me…
20 slide adapted from Prof Russell James III, "Texas Tech U

21. Understanding Preferences
Building a better Eliza (1966 computer program)
ELIZA mimicked a therapist by returning
whatever user typed with a question
> How does that make you feel?
> Tell me more about …
21

22. How to get people to talk about themselves?
Hunch is
exemplary at
playing “the
question
game”
17

23. Beware that Q&A can just be pesky
Eliza tricked people into thinking that we are talking about me
Microsoft “Clippy” had much more computational intelligence,
but it only directed attention to Clippy
23

24. Automating Choice
Subscriptions reduce friction of decision-making
Theater tickets / Gym membership
Amazon reduces cognitive load in multiple ways
! PRIME
! 15% off when you agree to transform a one-off to a subscription
Medical insurance –Seems irrational to choose high premium, low
deductible, yet many don’t want to make repeated calculations about
trade offs
QSelf, to the extent possible, needs to intrinsically capture trail of
information without requiring any deliberation
24

25. Sublime Example of Intrinsic Capture
Equanimity, a precisely vague meditation timer
! Supports tracking w/o crufty visual detail
Simply by using the timer for its
utilitarian function, you get
Lesson: Couple data collection to an action that is automatic
25

26. The crux of QSelf is Experimental Intervention
Sociology-style correlations can endlessly proliferate, but all the
logging in a life can’t tease apart confounds
The key requires combining streams of tracking data with
experimental manipulations
Create conditions that evoke the behavior you want to see
A key dependent variable should be “compliance with the
instruction”
28

27. “Copernican revolution” in my own thinking
about the QSelf
Craft scripts that intervene to manipulate pre-existing patterns
of behavior
Shift away from placing monitoring at the center
Don’t just track ambient behavior
Move toward methods that deliver an instruction
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28. How Decision Fatigue Can Help
Conceptualize your self as two parties:
Commander/controller is the “decider” at T 0
Executor/actor of script is the “follower” at T 0+N
Set up a stream of decisions in your longterm self interest
Send those instructions to your future self
Observe the success in implementing those
ITERATE
(Compare this to Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto)

29. Mindful Eating Experiment
Inspired by Robin Barooah's Mindful Attending Exercise
(QSelf Silivalley Meetup 8/11)
Robin’s experiment went from
WORN (Write once, read never)
to
WOWA (Write once, with attention)
! Experiment: noted how he felt, 3 hours after eating
31

30. Apps that Support Tracking Food Intake
Meal Snap
Affiliated with DailyBurn
Appears to use
Mechanical Turk to guess
Thin-Cam
Affiliated with ThinSite
Premium product sends
3X/week emails
$ from Supplements, etc

31. Experimental Design as a Challenge
Research exposes tendency to delay in face of uncertainty
Many QSelf attendees collect, but never take next step to xpt
It seems reasonable that people want a cookbook, not just
components
Genomera hosts a platform that has enabled Eri Gentry to
recruit people who can directly enroll in pre-designed A-B-A
experiments (Orange You Sleepy is running now)

32. Motivation and Self-Management
Loop of sending instruction to future self, & then using QSelf
tech to monitor compliance.
! Still sounds like I’m being bossed around (by me)
Parallel with Flores’ ActionWorks Business Process System?
! Each communication was an explicit commitment
! While it may work, it’s reported to be greatly resisted
Design mechanisms that support aleatoric degrees of freedom