Approach

Sleep tracking
Personal informatics
Quantified self

Data

Forum discussion
Qualitative analysis

Period

2015-2016

In Bed with Technology

Challenges and Opportunities for Sleep Tracking

In recent years a variety of mobile apps, wearable technologies and embedded systems have emerged that allow individuals to track the amount and the quality of their sleep in their own beds. Despite the widespread adoption of these technologies, little is known about the challenges that current users face in tracking and analysing their sleep. Hence we conducted a qualitative study to examine the practices of current users of sleep tracking technologies and to identify challenges in current practice. Based on data collected from 5 online forums for users of sleep-tracking technologies, we identified 22 different challenges under the following 4 themes: tracking continuity, trust, data manipulation, and data interpretation. Based on these results, we propose 6 design opportunities to assist researchers and practitioners in designing sleep-tracking technologies.

The figure below shows the sleep-tracking technologies examined in this study.

Single Project
Single Project

Publication

Wanyu Liu, Bernd Ploderer, and Thuong Hoang. 2015. In Bed with Technology: Challenges and Opportunities for Sleep Tracking. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Australian Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction (OzCHI '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 142–151. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2838739.2838742