2024 Research Speaker Series

Sean Munson

Professor, HCDE

OCTOBER 24, 2024

From Personal Data to Personal Health: Designing for Goals, Reflection, and Collaboration

Many people track their behaviors, context, and outcomes to understand and manage their health. Despite some successes, many people still experience misalignments between their goals and what their health tracking tools support. Successful reflection and action depend on foundations early in the tracking process, such as understanding and scaffolding for an individual’s goals.

As they work to make sense of and act on their data, people also turn to clinicians and other health experts for support in understanding and acting on their data. They also may need to collaborate and coordinate with peers, family members, and others for support, shared decision making, and acting together. These collaborations can bring additional challenges and opportunities for goal misalignments.

In this talk, I will discuss how common sources of goal misalignment in health tracking technologies and their uses. I will then show how a goal-directed approach to designing and using personal informatics tools can lead to lower burdens, improved understanding, and greater success in using personal informatics tools. Finally, I encourage caution focusing too much on data, or on designs that treat all problems as self-knowledge problems. There is an opportunity for our field to advance techniques for reflection that lead to advocacy for upstream, societal-level changes.

Sean A. Munson is a professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. Working primarily on challenges of health, wellbeing, and exposure to diverse information, Munson designs and evaluates techniques for helping people make sense of data about themselves and the world around them. He focuses on the challenges of designing for collaboration and coordination, to bring together the different expertise necessary to understand and act on these data.