Understanding Temporality of Reflection in Personal Informatics through Baby Tracking

Personal informatics literature has examined reflection in tracking, but there are gaps in our understanding of how self-initiated reflection that one engages in shortly after data collection has taken place occurs in everyday life and how technology can best support it. We use baby tracking as a case study to explore 'temporality, ' the time over which reflection occurs relative to data collection, as caregivers track their baby's well-being over both short-term and long-term. We interviewed 20 parents in the U.S. who used baby-tracking technology. We find that parents ask different questions based on the time elapsed since data collection, such as checking alignment with medical guidance and prior patterns immediately after tracking or augmenting memory when reflecting hours later. We summarize these findings into a framework for short-term reflection in baby tracking that includes three windows: the immediate, in-between, and cumulative. We use these windows to identify helpful design patterns in baby-tracking technologies toward supporting temporally meaningful reflection and opportunities for further study in other self-tracking domains.

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