From self-monitoring to self-understanding: Going beyond physiological sensing for supporting wellbeing

Abstract

Even though mental health is an important part of our wellbeing we believe that, so far, it has been overlooked in favour of physical health by most of the existing self-monitoring solutions. Our goal is to utilise context aware technologies in order to support people in understanding how various aspects of their lives influence their wellbeing, including their mental health. For that, we need to gain a deeper insight into the challenges of designing such solutions, from sensing to interaction paradigms. This paper describes our system, the design challenges we have encountered, the decisions we have made and our ongoing work in terms of system design as well as usage experiments. © 2011 ICST.