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Research on smart home monitoring for older adults has predominantly focused on systems whose data and alerts are directed towards family members, caregivers, or healthcare providers. Older adults have expressed interest in engaging with these systems by seeing and using their data, but they are often limited to a passive role as subjects of monitoring. This paper presents qualitative results of a longitudinal smart home project with older adults living independently in the community. Based on interviews conducted throughout the 2.5-year study with 12 participants, we report on their lived experiences of having the monitoring system in their homes and on how they reflected on the data collected by the system. The results show how participants were able to extract meaningful information from the monitoring data without finding the system invasive or intrusive. Specifically, older adults exhibited interest in data that they found indicative of living an active lifestyle, such as time spent outside the home. Drawing from critical literature on active aging, we discuss implications for incorporating peer comparisons to support reflection on personal health data without reinforcing a deficit narrative of aging. 

We present results from a qualitative study involving eight intergenerational families (27 participants) to understand how a family tracking intervention can help support care among intergenerational family members. Our findings show that family members communicate and stay aware of each other's' health through shared fitness data and conversations triggered by fitness sharing. We identified different challenges and preferences among the three age groups in our study: older adults enjoyed family fitness sharing but often encountered various technical challenges, the middle-aged group served as a key person to care for the rest of the family members, and the young generation could not fully engage in fitness sharing due to their busy schedule and privacy concerns. These findings suggest the design of family fitness sharing to account for the age differences in intergenerational families and support the unique needs of family fitness sharing. 

The research community on the study and design of systems for personal informatics has grown over the past decade. To take stock of what the topics the field has studied and methods the field has used, we map and label 523 publications from ACM's library, IEEE Xplore, and PubMed. We surface that the literature has focused on studying and designing for health and wellness domains, an emphasis on understanding and overcoming barriers to data collection and reflection, and progressively fewer contributions involving artifacts being made. Our mapping review suggests directions future research could explore, such as identifying and resolving barriers to tracking stages beyond collection and reflection, engaging more with domain experts, and further discussing the privacy and ethical concerns around tracked data.