Personal informatics applications in a variety of domains are increasingly enabled by low cost personal sensing. Although applications capture fine-grained activity for self reflection, sharing is generally limited to high level summaries. There are potential advantages to fine-grained sharing, but also potential harms. To help investigate this complex design space, we employ Value Sensitive Design to consider whether and how to share fine grained step activity. We identify key values and value tensions, and we develop scenarios to highlight these. We then design a set of data transformations that seek to maximize the benefits while minimizing the harms of detailed sharing. These include a novel approach to interactive modification of fine grained step data, allowing people to remove private data and using motif discovery to generate realistic replacement data. Finally, we conduct semi structured interviews with 12 participants examining these scenarios and transformations. We distill results into a set of design considerations for fine-grained physical activity sharing.
['Daniel A. Epstein', 'Alan Borning', 'James Fogarty']
Fine-grained sharing of sensed physical activity: a value sensitive approach