Lesson learned from collecting quantified self information via mobile and wearable devices

Abstract

The ubiquity and affordability of mobile and wearable devices has enabled us to continually and digitally record our daily life activities. Consequently, we are seeing the growth of data collection experiments in several scientific disciplines. Although these have yielded promising results, mobile and wearable data collection experiments are often restricted to a specific configuration that has been designed for a unique study goal. These approaches do not address all the real-world challenges of "continuous data collection" systems. As a result, there have been few discussions or reports about such issues that are faced when "implementing these platforms" in a practical situation. To address this, we have summarized our technical and user-centric findings from three lifelogging and Quantified Self data collection studies, which we have conducted in real-world settings, for both smartphones and smartwatches. In addition to (i) privacy and (ii) battery related issues; based on our findings we recommend further works to consider (iii) implementing multivariate reflection of the data; (iv) resolving the uncertainty and data loss; and (v) consider to minimize the manual intervention required by users. These findings have provided insights that can be used as a guideline for further Quantified Self or lifelogging studies.