Envisioning the Future of Personalization Through Personal Informatics

Abstract

In recent years, User Modeling (UM) scenery is changing. With the recent advancements in wearable and mobile technologies, the amount and type of data that can be gathered about users and employed to build User Models is rapidly expanding. UM can now be enriched with data regarding different aspects of people's daily lives and is likely to deliver novel personalized services. All these changes bring forth new research questions about the kinds of services which could be improved, which of them would be the most useful, the ways of conveying effectively new forms of recommendations, and how users would perceive them. In this paper the authors tried to find answers to some of these questions by exploiting a novel personalized system to conduct a qualitative user study, with the aim to understand users' needs and expectations w.r.t. personalization enabled by the presence of wearable and mobile technologies.