ABSTRACT
Quantified self-experimentation with personal diets is a popular activity among health enthusiasts, diagnosed patients, as well as "life hackers" pursuing self-optimization goals. In this paper, we reflect on self-experimentation practices in the context of amateur citizen science communities. We report findings from 11 month-long qualitative fieldwork in a community of nutrition hobbyists experimenting with a powdered food substitute "soylent". Our respondents customized the soylent powders to their personal needs, tracked their metabolic reactions to the diet, and discussed their findings with the online soylent user community. Although the data and knowledge sharing within the community positively impacted respondents' nutrition literacy, these activities created risks regarding their health safety and data privacy. We define soylent self-experimentation as a form of "extreme citizen science". Based on the limitations identified in the soylent community, we suggest a set of design recommendations for extreme citizen science projects.
- 2016 soylent Eaters Survey. 2016. Retrieved June 1, 2016 from http://www.ketosoy.com/blogs/news/results-of-the2016-soylent-eaters-surveyGoogle Scholar
- ACM digital library. 2016. "query": { keywords.author.keyword:(+citizen +science) }Google Scholar
- Earl R. Babbie, 1986. The practice of social research. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co.Google Scholar
- Kristen Barta and Gina Neff. 2016. Technologies for Sharing: lessons from Quantified Self about the political economy of platforms. Information, Communication & Society 19, 4, 518--531.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Michael Billig and Henri Tajfel. 1973. Social categorization and similarity in intergroup behaviour. European Journal of Social Psychology. 3 (1): 27--52.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Chia-Fang Chung, Kristin Dew, Allison Cole, Jasmine Zia, James Fogarty, Julie A. Kientz, and Sean A. Munson. 2016. Boundary Negotiating Artifacts in Personal Informatics: Patient-Provider Collaboration with Patient-Generated Data. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 770--786. Google ScholarDigital Library
- DIY soylent. 2016. Website. Retrieved May 26, 2016 from http://diy.soylent.com/Google Scholar
- Markéta Dolejšová. 2016. Deciphering a Meal through Open Source Standards: Soylent and the Rise of Diet Hackers. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 436--448. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Markéta Dolejšová. 2015. A Taste of Big Data on the Global Dinner Table. Journal for Artistic Research, 9/2015.Google Scholar
- Boka En and Mercedes Pöll. 2016. Are you selftracking? Risks, norms and optimisation in selfquantifying practices. Graduate Journal of Social Science April 2016, Vol. 12, Issue 2, pp. 37--57. ISSN: 1572-3763Google Scholar
- Google Trends. 2016. Explore: "Citizen Science". Retrieved May 22, 2016 from http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22citizen %20science%22&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT-2Google Scholar
- Muki Haklay. 2013. Citizen science and volunteered geographic information: Overview and typology of participation. In Crowdsourcing geographic knowledge Springer, 105--122.Google Scholar
- Alan Irwin. 1995. Citizen Science: A Study of People, Expertise and Sustainable Development . Psychology Press.Google Scholar
- Ravi Karkar, James Fogarty, Julie A. Kientz, Sean A. Munson, Roger Vilardaga, and Jasmine Zia. 2015. Opportunities and challenges for self-experimentation in self-tracking. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp/ISWC'15 Adjunct). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 991--996. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ian Kerridge. 2005. Altruism or reckless curiosity? A brief history of self experimentation in medicine", Internal Medical Journal, vol. 24, iss. 2, pp. 43--48,Google Scholar
- Stacey Kuznetsov, Aniket Kittur, and Eric Paulos. 2015. Biological Citizen Publics: Personal Genetics as a Site of Public Engagement with Science. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jisoo Lee. 2013. Supporting self-experimentation of behavior change strategies. In Proceedings of the 2013 ACM conference on Pervasive and ubiquitous computing adjunct publication (UbiComp '13 Adjunct). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 361--366. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gina Neff & Dawn Nafus. 2016. The Self-Tracking: MIT Press.Google Scholar
- Patients Like Me. 2016. Website. Retrieved May 26, 2016 from http://www.patientslikeme.com/Google Scholar
- Jurij Pfeiffer, Matthias von Entress-Fuersteneck, Nils Urbach, and Arne Buchwald. 2016. Quantify-Me: Consumer Acceptance of Wearable Self-Tracking Devices. Proceedings of the 24th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Istanbul, Turkey, 99. Paper, June 2016.Google Scholar
- Jennifer Preece and Anne Bowser. 2014. What HCI can do for citizen science. In CHI '14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 10591060. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Quantified Self. 2016. Retrieved May 24, 2016 from http://quantifiedself.com/Google Scholar
- Danial Qaurooni, Ali Ghazinejad, Inna Kouper, and Hamid Ekbia. 2016. Citizens for Science and Science for Citizens: The View from Participatory Design. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1822--1826. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Reddit soylent group. 2016. Retrieved May 26, 2016 from reddit.com/r/soylentGoogle Scholar
- Robert Rhinehart. 2013. How I Stopped Eating Food. (February 2013). Retrieved May 26, 2016 from http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298Google Scholar
- Soylent. 2016. Retrieved May 26, 2016 from http://www.soylent.com/Google Scholar
- Soylent discourse. 2016. Retrieved May 26, 2016 from http://discourse.soylent.me/Google Scholar
- Soylent discourse. 2016. Looking for volunteer Rails devs. Retrieved May 26, 2016 from https//discourse.soylent.com/t/looking-for-volunteerrails-devs/442Google Scholar
- Lara Spiteri Cornish, and Caroline Moraes. 2015. The impact of consumer confusion on nutrition literacy and subsequent dietary behavior. Psychology & Marketing, 32(5), 558--574.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Matthias Stevens, Michalis Vitos, Julia Altenbuchner, Gillian Conquest, Jessica Lewis, and Muki Haklay. 2014. Taking participatory citizen science to extremes. Pervasive Computing, IEEE, 13(2), 20--29.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Melanie Swan. 2012. Health 2050: The realization of personalized medicine through crowdsourcing, the quantified self, and the participatory biocitizen. Journal of Personalized Medicine, 2(3), 93--118.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Melanie Swan. 2013. The quantified self: Fundamental disruption in big data science and biological discovery. Big Data 1, 2, 85--99.Google ScholarCross Ref
- UCLA ExCiteS group. 2013. Projects. Retrieved May 24, 2016 from https://www.ucl.ac.uk/excites/projectsGoogle Scholar
- Effy Vayena and John Tasioulas. 2015. "We the Scientists": a Human Right to Citizen Science. Philosophy & Technology 28, 3, 479--485.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Barry D Weiss, Mary Z Mays, William Martz, Kelley Merriam Castro, Darren A DeWalt, Michael P Pignone, . . . Frank A Hale. 2005. Quick assessment of literacy in primary care: the newest vital sign. The Annals of Family Medicine, 3(6), 514--522.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Peter West, Richard Giordano, Max Van Kleek, and Nigel Shadbolt. 2016. The Quantified Patient in the Doctor's Office: Challenges & Opportunities. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3066--3078. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gary Wolf. 2011. What is the quantified self? Quantified Self. Retrieved September 12, 2016 from http:// quantifiedself.com/2011/03/what-is-thequantified-self/Google Scholar
- David Zeevi, Tal Korem, Niv Zmora, David Israeli, Daphna Rothschild, Adina Weinberger, Orly BenYacov, Dar Lador, Tali Avnit-Sagi, and Maya LotanPompan. 2015. Personalized nutrition by prediction of glycemic responses. Cell 163, 5, 1079--1094.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- Soylent Diet Self-Experimentation: Design Challenges in Extreme Citizen Science Projects
Recommendations
Self-E: Smartphone-Supported Guidance for Customizable Self-Experimentation
CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsThe ubiquity of self-tracking devices and smartphone apps has empowered people to collect data about themselves and try to self-improve. However, people with little to no personal analytics experience may not be able to analyze data or run experiments ...
Digital Health & Self-experimentation: Design Challenges & Provocations
CHI EA '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing SystemsQuantified self-experimentation with personal health is a growing activity among health enthusiasts, biohackers, and patients with chronic conditions. By collecting and sharing their health data through self-tracking devices and health networking ...
Opportunities and challenges for self-experimentation in self-tracking
UbiComp/ISWC'15 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2015 ACM International Symposium on Wearable ComputersPersonal informatics applications support capture and access of data related to an increasing variety of dimensions of everyday life. However, such applications often fail to effectively support diagnostic self-tracking, wherein people seek to answer a ...
Comments