A Review of Personal Informatics Research for People with Motor Disabilities

Abstract

Personal informatics (PI) has become an area of significant research over the past decade, maturing into a sub-field that seeks to support people from many backgrounds and life contexts in collecting and finding value in their personal data. PI research includes a focus on people with chronic conditions as a monolithic group, but currently fails to distinguish the needs of people with motor disabilities (MD). To understand how current PI literature addresses those needs, we conducted a mapping review on PI publications engaged with people with MD. We report results from 50 publications identified in the ACM DL, Pubmed, JMIR, SCOPUS, and IEEE Xplore. Our analysis shows significant incompatibilities between the needs of individuals with MD and the ways that PI literature supports them. We also found inconsistencies in the ways that disability levels are reported, that PI literature for MD excludes non-health-related data domains, and an insufficient focus on PI tools' accessibility and usability for some MD users. In contrast with Epstein et al.'s [36] recent PI review, behavior change and habit awareness were the most common motivation in these publications. Finally, many of the reviewed articles reported involvement by caregivers, trainers, healthcare providers, and researchers across the PI stages. In addition to these insights, we provide recommendations for designing PI technology through a user-centric lens that will broaden the scope of PI and include people regardless of their motor abilities.