Self-tracking physiological and psychological data poses the challenge of presentation and interpretation. Insightful narratives for self-tracking data can motivate the user towards constructive self-reflection. One powerful form of narrative that engages audience across various culture and age groups is animated movies. We collected a week of self-reported mood and behavior data from each user and created in Unity a personalized animation based on their data. We evaluated the impact of their video in a randomized control trial with a non-personalized animated video as control. We found that personalized videos tend to be more emotionally engaging, encouraging greater and lengthier writing that indicated self-reflection about moods and behaviors, compared to non-personalized control videos.
@article{arxiv.1801.02691,
title = {A Trip to the Moon: Personalized Animated Movies for Self-reflection},
author = {Fengjiao Peng and Veronica LaBelle and Emily Yue and Rosalind Picard},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.02691},
year = {2018}
}