• Corpus ID: 17774460

Quantifying the Quantified Self: A Study on the Motivations of Patients to Track Their Own Health

@inproceedings{Gimpel2013QuantifyingTQ,
  title={Quantifying the Quantified Self: A Study on the Motivations of Patients to Track Their Own Health},
  author={Henner Gimpel and M. Ni{\ss}en and Roland A. G{\"o}rlitz},
  booktitle={International Conference on Interaction Sciences},
  year={2013}
}

• Henner Gimpel, M. Nißen, Roland A. Görlitz
• Published in
  International Conference on…
  2013
• Medicine

A new generation of patient-driven healthcare information systems (HIS) is emerging to advance traditional healthcare services and empower patient self-responsibility. Professional approaches to develop or improve HIS exist alongside evolving individual and community-shared approaches where patients take responsibility for their health data and health. Health Social Networks and the Quantified Self community are examples for such patient-driven initiatives. They inherently focus on empowering self-determination and responsibility. The success of future HIS relies – at least partially – on their engineers’ and developers’ capability to understand and use impulses from their respective target groups. The present study on self-tracking motivations aims to shed light on what drives people to track themselves. To this end, we conducted an exploratory survey with 150 self-trackers and developed a Five-Factor-Framework of Self-Tracking Motivations. The framework includes an inventory of five factors and a psychometrical scale of 19 items to measure individual drivers for self-tracking.