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People often face barriers to selecting self-tracking tools that support their goals and needs, resulting in tools not meeting their expectations and ultimately abandonment. We therefore examine how people approach selecting self-tracking apps and investigate how technology can better support the process. Drawing on past literature on how people select and perceive the features of commercial and research tracking tools, we surface seven attributes people consider during selection, and design a low-fidelity prototype of an app store that highlights these attributes. We then conduct semi-structured interviews with 18 participants to further investigate what people consider during selection, how people select self-tracking apps, and how surfacing tracking-related attributes could better support selection. We find that people often prioritize features related to self-tracking during selection, such as approaches to collecting and reflecting on data, and trial apps to determine whether they would suit their needs. Our results also show potential for technology surfacing how apps support tracking to reduce barriers to selection. We discuss future opportunities for improving self-tracking app selection, such as ways to enhance existing self-tracking app distribution platforms to enable people to filter and search apps by desirable features.
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This content will become publicly available on April 25, 2026
Tracking and its Potential for Older Adults with Memory Concerns
Much research on older people with memory concerns is focused on tracking and informed by the priorities of others. In this paper, we seek to understand the potential that people with memory concerns see in tracking. We conducted interviews with 29 participants with concerns about their memory and engaged in an affective writing approach. We find a range of potentials that can be traced to how participants are already self-tracking. Emotions associated with these potentials vary: from acceptance to resistance, and positive anticipation to aversion. Participants are emotionally motivated to foreclose possibilities in some instances and keep them open in others. While individual and unique, potential is structured by forces that include individual routines, relationships with others, and macro-level institutions and cultural contexts. We reflect on these findings in the context of research on self-tracking with older adults, designing with ambiguity, and forces that structure the experience of living with memory concerns.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1955568
- PAR ID:
- 10639241
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 15
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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