Understanding Adoption, Use, and Abandonment Practices in Baby Tracking

New parents often turn to baby-tracking technology to monitor and reflect on the daily routines of their infants. However, we lack understanding of how tracking practices evolve as children grow and develop, with caregivers adopting, using, and eventually abandoning baby tracking. We analyze the logs of 60 parents and 71 children who used the popular baby-tracking app Huckleberry for an average of 12 months, combined with re-analyzing interviews with 20 parents who used various baby-tracking technologies. We find that parents start tracking at different ages, track habitually and intermittently, change and swap what and how they track, and often gradually abandon the practice. Through unpacking why these patterns occur, we find that parents effectively self-manage what data categories are worthwhile to continue tracking. We point out lessons that domains outside baby tracking can take from the evolving, longitudinal process, and present design recommendations to better support caregivers across phases.

• Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models.