UC Irvine

The increasing ubiquity of personal devices and technologies, such as home displays, smart-speakers, and wearables, has created new opportunities for individuals and families to monitor and manage their health and wellbeing. However, personal and family informatics systems have not kept up with such increased ubiquity, leading to a missed opportunity in making health informatics more convenient, connected, and meaningful. Many continue to struggle to effectively incorporate tracking into their daily lives and leverage the multiple technologies they have contact with. In my dissertation, I investigate how the design of multi-device health informatics systems can better support individuals in their self-tracking practices and facilitate collaboration within families for collective wellbeing. By leveraging the diverse capabilities of smartphones, smartwatches, smart-speakers, and more, I demonstrate how informatics tools can be designed to accommodate the varied needs and contexts of everyday life, both for individual use and for family collaboration.

Towards self-tracking, I demonstrate how multi-device, multimodal systems can provide flexibility and redundancy of options for rich data capture and help individuals overcome situational barriers to tracking. Through the design and evaluation of the ModEat system, I show how supporting food journaling across smartphones, computers, and voice assistants with various input modalities can accommodate people's goals, preferences, and contexts.

Examining how to help families collaborate towards health and wellbeing management, I explore the design of multi-device systems to facilitate family co-regulation practices. My evaluation of the CoolTaco deployment demonstrates that a smartwatch-based system can mediate shared awareness and remote collaboration between parents and children with ADHD around behavioral regulation. Through a co-design study, I reveal opportunities for in-home displays to integrate family data and guide productive discussions around each member's regulation needs relating to moods, exercise, and goals. Building on these insights, my design and evaluation of FamilyBloom showcases how integrating personal and shared devices can support diverse co-regulation practices, enabling reflection and mutual care in the face of varied routines and individual preferences within families.

Through these studies, my dissertation demonstrates that multi-device, multimodal health informatics can support the needs of individuals and families in their everyday practices surrounding tracking, reflecting, and acting for self and co-regulation of health and wellbeing needs. I suggest that leveraging device ecosystems and designing for varied levels of engagement and collaboration can result in more available and useful tools. Through empirical findings and novel systems, my dissertation contributes to understanding of how to create effective tools for personal and family health tracking in everyday life.