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Title: The Lived Experience of Child-Owned Wearables: Comparing Children's and Parents’ Perspectives on Activity Tracking
Children are increasingly using wearables with physical activity tracking features. Although research has designed and evaluated novel features for supporting parent-child collaboration with these wearables, less is known about how families naturally adopt and use these technologies in their everyday life. We conducted interviews with 17 families who have naturally adopted child-owned wearables to understand how they use wearables individually and collaboratively. Parents are primarily motivated to use child-owned wearables for children's long-term health and wellbeing, whereas children mostly seek out entertainment and feeling accomplished through reaching goals. Children are often unable to interpret or contextualize the measures that wearables record, while parents do not regularly track these measures and focus on deviations from their children's routines. We discuss opportunities for making naturally-occurring family moments educational to positively contribute to children's conceptual understanding of health, such as developing age-appropriate trackable metrics for shared goal-setting and data reflection.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1850389
PAR ID:
10252705
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 12
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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