Barriers to and Facilitators of Using a One Button Tracker and Web-Based Data Analytics Tool for Personal Science:...

Area of Science:

• Digital health
• Health behavior
• Self-tracking technologies

Background:

• Subjective health self-tracking is challenging due to high effort or inaccurate retrospective reporting.
• Current methods often lead to poor accuracy and compliance in health monitoring.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the usability and usefulness of a low-effort, in-the-moment self-tracking tool.
• To determine the necessary support for effective self-tracking using simple instrumentation.

Main Methods:

• Exploratory study using the One Button Tracker for time-stamped self-tracking of subjective phenomena.
• 13 academic medical center employees tracked personal health questions for 2-4 weeks.
• Assessed usability and usefulness via semistructured interviews and the System Usability Scale.

Main Results:

• Identified 29 barriers and 15 facilitators, with ease of use being a key facilitator.
• Achieved a median System Usability Scale score of 75.0, indicating good usability.
• Observed increased awareness, knowledge confirmation, insight gain, and behavior change; support was highly valued.

Conclusions:

• Low-effort, in-the-moment self-tracking supports personal knowledge gain and health behavior change.
• This approach is beneficial for health promotion interests.
• Further validation could extend its utility to other users and health questions.