FamilyBloom: Examining Ecologies of Collaboration in Family-Centered Health Tracking

Paper Title

FamilyBloom: Examining Ecologies of Collaboration in Family-Centered Health Tracking

Publication Info

• Topic area: Family-centered health informatics and collaborative tracking
• Keywords: family informatics, health tracking, ADHD, co-regulation, ecological systems theory, mood tracking, goal tracking, smartwatch, home display, collaboration

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing family health informatics tools focus on specific moments or caregiving for individual members, often limiting opportunities for mutual collaboration and multidirectional support across diverse family contexts.
• Significance: Understanding how family-centered health technologies can enable pervasive collaboration across daily contexts is critical for improving family health behavior regulation, particularly for families managing challenges like ADHD.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work has explored personal and family informatics, focusing on specific routines or caregiving roles, but lacks insights into how technologies can support mutual collaboration across ecological systems (e.g., home, school, clinical care). This paper builds on ecological systems theory to address these gaps.

Solution

• Proposed approach: FamilyBloom, a multi-device system integrating smartwatch and home display interfaces for mood and goal tracking, designed to support pervasive family collaboration across ecological contexts.
• Novelty:
  1. Design and deployment of FamilyBloom, enabling family members to track and share moods and goals across daily contexts.
  2. Application of Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (EST) to analyze family health technologies across multiple ecological layers.
  3. Insights into ecosystem-aware family informatics, balancing individuality and collective needs while navigating temporal and contextual challenges.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Iterative design process involving sketches, prototypes, and pilot testing.
  • Deployment with 12 families (44 participants) for an average of 12 weeks, including neurotypical and ADHD members.
  • Data collection through mood and goal logs, interviews, and thematic analysis organized using EST.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Families tracked an average of 4.02 moods per person per day and logged 187 unique goals (5,979 total logs, 1,286 completed).
  • FamilyBloom facilitated emotional awareness, empathy, and co-regulation, but also revealed tensions around privacy, apathy, and conflict.
  • Long-term use fostered shared vocabulary and mutual understanding, while crises disrupted tracking routines.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Enabled multidirectional support (e.g., child-to-parent, sibling-to-sibling) rather than unidirectional caregiving.
  • Supported preparatory co-regulation and anticipatory planning before family reunions.
  • Addressed gaps in integrating individual and family-level tracking across ecological systems.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Deployment study with 12 families, including 14 ADHD and 10 neurotypical children, across diverse contexts (home, school, clinical care).
  • Qualitative analysis of 9 higher-level themes and 29 sub-themes using EST.
  • Quantitative analysis of mood and goal logs for patterns and insights.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited diversity in family structures, cultural backgrounds, and socioeconomic contexts.
  • Indirect and opportunistic involvement of teachers and extended family.
  • Future work could explore quantitative health outcomes, broader ecological integration, and cultural influences on tracking.

Summary

FamilyBloom demonstrates how collaborative mood and goal tracking can support family health behavior regulation across multiple ecological systems, including individual, family, school, and clinical contexts. The system facilitated emotional awareness, empathy, and co-regulation, while revealing challenges in balancing individuality and collective needs, navigating privacy concerns, and sustaining engagement during crises. By applying ecological systems theory, the study highlights the importance of ecosystem-aware family informatics that adapts to diverse contexts and temporal circumstances. These findings inform future designs for family-centered health technologies that integrate personal and shared tracking to foster collaboration and resilience.