We are presently seeing a rapid increase of tools for tracking and analyzing activities, from lifelogging in general to specific activities such as exercise tracking. Guided by the perspectives of collection, procedural, and analysis support, this paper presents the results from a review of 71 existing tools, striving to capture the design choices within personal informatics that such tools are using. The classification system this creates is a contribution in three ways: as a standalone state-of-practice representation, for assessing individual tools and potential future design directions for them, and as a guide for new development of personal informatics tools

Quantified self apps and other personal informatics designs have rapidly grown in popularity through the advent of convenient Internet of Things related wearables and improved sensor technology. The rapid growth has, however, left its mark on how we study this area as the utility that could be provided has become the centerpiece of attention. This appears somewhat contradictory, as personal informatics technology becomes integrated in life in nuanced ways, contributing value beyond the instrumental data analysis role. In this paper, we propose relying on postphenomenology as a useful foundation for extending the study of personal informatics, and provide three concluding implications intended to guide the discussion of such an extension.

An expanding range of apps supported by wearable and mobile devices are being used by people engaged in personal informatics in order to track and explore data about themselves and their everyday activities. While the aspect of data collection is easier than ever before through these technologies, more advanced forms of support from personal informatics systems are not presently available. This lack of next generation personal informatics systems presents research with an important role to fill, and this paper presents a two-step contribution to this effect. The first step is to present a new model of human cooperation with intelligent computing, which collates key issues from the literature. The second step is to apply this model to personal informatics, identifying twelve key considerations for integrating intelligent computing in the design of future personal informatics systems. These design considerations are also applied to an example system, which illustrates their use in eliciting new design directions.

Information architecture, concerned with the structural design of information spaces/systems, and context-aware adaptive systems, supporting situated system use through a computational approach, are presented as two converging fields. Specific points of convergence include balancing immediate use with awareness, tackling choice overload and promoting discovery, and dealing with the increasing complexity of user context. The role of information architecture can be to apply a holistic view of systems, users, and context, thereby promoting awareness and discovery over of specific task efficiency measures. Further, designing meaningful structures from large, complex sets of information, is an information architecture skill well-suited for addressing the issues of context.