Self-monitoring and Technology: Challenges and Open Issues in Personal Informatics

Personal Informatics (PI), also known as Quantified Self (QS), is a school of thought which aims to use technology for acquiring and collecting data on different aspects of the daily lives of people. These data can be internal states (such as mood or glucose level in the blood) or indicators of performance (such as the kilometers run). Some research was conducted in order to discover the problems related to the usage of PI tools, although none investigated how common users use these tools for tracking their behavior. The goal of this paper is to provide some insights about challenges and open issues regarding the usage of PI tools from the point of view of a common user. To this aim, we provide a theoretical background of personal informatics and a brief review on the previous studies that have investigated the usage pattern of PI tools.