Wearable activity trackers are becoming widely adopted, yet challenges continue to exist in effective long-term use and adoption. Existing research focuses mostly on the use and adoption challenges associated with technical or devicerelated issues and respective workaround strategies. Little is known about how personal preferences and other individual characteristics affect use and adoption of wearable activity trackers. In this paper, the authors present a sixweek user study of 26 users using physical activity trackers embedded in clipon and smart watch physical devices. They describe novel implications of the usage patterns, including the need to help people be mindful of their physical activity trackers, to understand and further articulate gender differences in use and adoption of wearable devices, to incorporate big data analytics in informing and coaching people’s practices, and to reframe data inaccuracy as a byproduct of mismanagement of expectations of the device’s capabilities and its expected usage. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting