SleepTight: Low-burden, Self-monitoring Technology for Capturing and Reflecting on Sleep Behaviors

Manual tracking of health behaviors affords many benefits, including increased awareness and engagement. However, the capture burden makes long-term manual tracking chal-lenging. In this study on sleep tracking, we examine ways to reduce the capture burden of manual tracking while lev-eraging its benefits. We report on the design and evaluation of SleepTight, a low-burden, self-monitoring tool that lev-erages the Android’s widgets both to reduce the capture burden and to improve access to information. Through a four-week deployment study (N = 22), we found that partic-ipants who used SleepTight with the widgets enabled had a higher sleep diary compliance rate (92%) than participants who used SleepTight without the widgets (73%). In addi-tion, the widgets improved information access and encour-aged self-reflection. We discuss how to leverage widgets to help people collect more data and improve access to infor-mation, and more broadly, how to design successful manual self-monitoring tools that support self-reflection. Author Keywords Sleep; health; self-monitoring; self-tracking; personal in-formatics; Quantified Self; manual tracking; self-reflection; self-awareness. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI)]