UC San Diego

The increasing capabilities of sensing and mobile technology are enabling to us gather more health data than ever. This data helps us understand personal health, reveals factors that affect personal health, and informs the design of personal health tracking systems that tackle health concerns. The reliability of personal health technologies has allowed for deployments outside of the lab and in uncontrolled environments. Users can track their health with these tracking systems as part of their daily life. These deployments reveal that sustainable and long-term use is currently difficult and that users are struggling to track and reach their health goals using these systems. This dissertation posits that the current design lens is too narrow. The current design lens solely focuses on addressing the health concern and excludes the context where health concerns and activities that affect our health take place and where tracking is performed. To address these shortcomings this dissertation demonstrates how widening the design lens to consider the relationships between the user, the health concern, and the social and physical context in which the health concern takes place allows designing for more sustainable use. This dissertation explains and demonstrates how using an ecological framework reveals interactions and relationships between all the different aspects that affect a given health concern, tracking it, and how to design to considering the ecology the user is part of and where the health concern takes place. To demonstrate the importance of taking an ecological approach to designing personal health tracking systems insight from four studies are presented. Based on the insights from these studies, this dissertation closes with takeaways that inform the design of future personal health technologies that will lead to more sustainable, long-term use.