AAAI Technical Report SS-12-05
Self-Tracking and Collective Intelligence for Personal Wellness
TrackIt: A Team-Based Application for Health and Wellness Monitoring
Jason Loewy and Yu-Han Chang and Rajiv Maheswaran
University of Southern California - Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way Suite 1001, Marina Del Rey, CA 90292, USA
Abstract
Health and wellness monitoring is an emerging area for mobile applications. One problem that has not been addressed
is that tools have mostly focused on the individual and ignore many aspects of health and wellness that depends on
teams. These teams could either be a team of professionals or
a support network including friends and family. We present a
team-based tool, TrackIt, that enables tracking of both activity duration and location, and enables users to be part of multiple teams. TrackIt supports distributed generation of tasks
that belong to multiple people, each of whom can report on
status and monitor progress, and will provide intelligent collaboration tools and activity recognition capabilities.
Introduction
Figure 1: TrackIt team-based screenshots
Mobile applications in health care is an emerging area of
development (Ahtinen et al. 2009; Alagöz et al. 2010;
Årsand et al. 2010; Blake 2008; Boulos et al. 2011;
Hache, Lemaire, and Baddour 2011; Holzinger et al. 2010).
They enable users to track and monitor a variety of activities
such as food habits, physical activity, medication, appointments and many other health-related tasks and goals. The
ease of recording and retrieving information opens up new
possibilities for interactions to improve the livelihood and
well-being at a large-scale as the technology becomes ubiquitous with inexpensive mobile consumer electronics.
There is one key aspect of health behavior that has gone
unaddressed in most mobile health applications: that people
are parts of teams. Most applications focus on individual
tracking and information delivery. However, there are many
situations where an individual’s particular health goal involves many people. For a health issue, one may be involved
with many professionals — such as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and physical therapists — as well as family members.
These members are all potential generators and consumers
of information. Another way in which people are members
of teams are in support groups for goals such as smoking
cessation, weight loss, or exercise. As the increase of social
media and the ease of interconnectivity between individuals
continues to expand, the use of social connections to support
health-related goals is bound to grow. We have developed
TrackIt to provide support and better understanding not just
to the individual with a medical condition or wellness goal,
but to everyone in their surrounding support group.
TrackIt
The initial version of TrackIt delivers the following capabilities: (1) the ability to create and join teams, (2) the ability
to add tasks and track when and for how long they are active, (3) a distributed note gathering process, (4) locationbased monitoring, and (5) location and task-based reporting capabilities for the team. In Figure 1, we show various
screenshots of TrackIt that display its team-based capabilities. Users can be invited to join a team or create their own
teams. Once they join a team, they can access the resources
and roster of that team. In our example, a user who is part
of a Diabetes support group has been invited to join a Hypertension prevention support group. As part of the Diabetes support group, the user gets access to resources such
as quick links to a diabetes mailing list, website, as well as
medical professionals who are part of the group.
In Figure 2, we show various goal-based screenshots.
Goals or tasks can be added by any member of the team for
any other members of the team. The goals and the tasks can
be made into a hierarchy which allows for a network of subtasks at various levels of abstractions. Permissions decide
who can add and view various subtrees of the goal/task hier-
c 2012, Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Copyright Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
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other record involves location traces of where the users are
or were. Users can toggle on the location tracking services,
which may be useful if users wanted to understand where
they were over time or if they want to allow other users to
find them. Additionally, tasks can be marked at locations, so
that user’s can plan daily activities (e.g., doctor’s appointment, pharmacy, exercise, family visit) with a map-based
view of tasks.
Summary and Future Work
TrackIt is a mobile-applications focused on allowing teams
of people to participate in tracking and monitoring activities.
This is particularly relevant to health and wellness related
applications for goals involving both medical professionals
and social support. Human activities are becoming group
activities more than individual activities, and wellness software must reflect this reality. Future directions involve the
embedding and transmitting of more sophisticated tracking
and reporting such as multimedia including photo and video
reporting, automatic identification of current activities based
on log entries and phone-based sensor data such as GPS and
accelerometer, and intelligent multi-agent collaboration and
incentive mechanisms.
Figure 2: TrackIt goal-based screenshots
References
Ahtinen, A.; Mattila, E.; Vaatanen, A.; Hynninen, L.; Salminen, J.; Koskinen, E.; and Laine, K. 2009. User experiences of mobile wellness applications in health promotion.
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Alagöz, F.; Valdez, A. C.; Wilkowska, W.; Ziefle, M.;
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to mobile internet, from user focus to culture and hedonism
the crucible of mobile health care and wellness applications.
In ICPCA10 International Conference on Pervasive Computer Applications. IEEE. 38–45.
Årsand, E.; Tatara, N.; Østengen, G.; and Hartvigsen, G.
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Figure 3: TrackIt notes and reports screenshots.
archy. In addition, permissions can decide who can update
and modify the status of any goal or task in the tree. We also
include the ability to mark exactly when a task was started
and stopped to enable users to see how long they spend on
particular activities such as exercise.
With TrackIt, user locations are logged while tracking
their progress and stored alongside the timestamped data.
This will enable the system to infer activities based on surrounding log entries. With the large volume of data being
stored by users doing various in-app activities, multiple report views are available to help users and their support group
specialists to analyze the data and interpret it corresponding
to their own role and perspective.
Members of the team are allowed to annotate various tasks
and goals with notes. This may be important for professionals to leave information for each other or to a patient or family member. In a social setting, this may be useful for friends
in a support group to encourage each other or leave valuable
information that may be useful to many people involved in a
common goal. TrackIt enables team members with permission to access the logs of other users for whom they have
access. For example, this might include the timeline of activities for the user. Appropriate users can add or modify
these timelines to correct or augment them if necessary. An-
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