Our paper on the city-scale data analysis of population step count behavior has won the Distinguished Paper Award in PACM IMWUT Vol. 3. Among 6 awarded from 166 total papers published.
With this, we hope more researchers can learn how to deeply analyze surprisingly complex behavioral data due to the heterogenous behaviors and personalities in population data.
Changing lifestyles have lead to public health concerns regarding chronic diseases, such as obesity and diabetes, due to poor diet and lack of physical activity. Recently, fitness trackers have become commodity and this can provide a powerful tool to help people manage their health. While research in sensors HCI has focused on individual usage, how to track physical activity and issues in adoptability, little work has explored how a larger population of users use and are influenced by trackers. In collaboration with public health officials, we are developing analytic methods to help campaign organizers understand various user tracker behaviors. This can help inform how to better engage various sub-populations and promote population health.
Lim, B. Y., Kay, J., and Liu, W. 2019. How does a nation walk? Interpreting large-scale step count activity with weekly streak patterns. In Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT). (IMWUT Vol. 3 Distinguished Paper Award (6/166)).