Fostering Engagement with Personal Informatics Systems

Personal informatics systems are becoming increasing prevalent as their price, form, and ease of use improves. Though these systems offer great potential value to users, many systems are hampered by issues that limit their ability to foster engagement, and people often abandon use of these systems without garnering meaningful outcomes. While continued use of these systems is not necessary for all people, there is an opportunity to better support people working towards achievement-based goals. In this paper, we draw from the literature and our own prior Work to identify a number of problems that hinder engagement with achievement-based personal informatics systems-problems related to inadequate support for goal setting, misalignment of user and system goals, and the burden of system maintenance. We then propose seven strategies for the design community to explore for mitigating these problems and discuss how these strategies could be used to foster engagement with PI systems.