Understanding Adoption, Use, and Abandonment Practices in Baby Tracking

Paper Title

Understanding Adoption, Use, and Abandonment Practices in Baby Tracking

Publication Info

• Topic area: Baby-tracking technology and its evolving use by caregivers.
• Keywords: Baby tracking, personal informatics, adoption, use, abandonment, parenting technology, Huckleberry app, caregiving, tracking practices, childcare transitions, design recommendations.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing research lacks empirical understanding of how parents adopt, use, and abandon baby-tracking technologies over time. Most studies focus on short-term reflections or siloed tracking categories, ignoring the longitudinal evolution of tracking practices.
• Significance: Baby tracking is critical for infant health monitoring, helping parents and clinicians identify developmental issues and ensuring adherence to medical guidelines. Understanding tracking evolution can improve technology design to better support caregivers.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work has explored motivations for baby tracking (e.g., memory augmentation, communication with caregivers) and its benefits (e.g., promoting breastfeeding, developmental milestone tracking). However, gaps remain in understanding long-term tracking behaviors, transitions, and abandonment, particularly in multifaceted tracking contexts.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A mixed-methods study combining quantitative analysis of Huckleberry app logs from 60 parents (tracking 71 children) and qualitative re-analysis of interviews with 20 parents using various baby-tracking technologies.
• Novelty:
  1. Empirical characterization of adoption, use, and abandonment practices in baby tracking.
  2. Insights into value-driven decisions and challenges in continuing tracking.
  3. Identification of nuanced abandonment patterns, including gradual and partial discontinuation.
  4. Design recommendations for supporting dynamic tracking practices.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Quantitative analysis of 3,270.4 average entries per participant from Huckleberry app logs, focusing on tracking intensity, category usage, and abandonment trends.
  • Qualitative thematic analysis of interviews to understand motivations and behaviors behind tracking practices.
  • Iterative triangulation of quantitative and qualitative findings to identify patterns and insights.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • 83% of parents started tracking during the newborn phase, averaging 19.55 daily entries across 4.8 categories.
  • Later starters (17%) began tracking around 5 months after birth, focusing on categories like sleep.
  • Commonly tracked categories included milk feeds, diapers, and sleep, with tracking intensity decreasing over time.
  • Parents often adopted new categories (e.g., solids) in response to developmental milestones and dropped others (e.g., diapers) as their value diminished.
  • Tracking practices varied: habitual tracking (39% of children), intermittent tracking (e.g., growth, medicine), and increased commitment during childcare transitions.
  • Abandonment occurred through dropping categories, lessening frequency or detail, or complete discontinuation (32% of children had no entries in the last month of data).
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Provides empirical evidence of nuanced tracking behaviors, unlike prior work focused on self-reported goals or siloed categories.
  • Highlights multifaceted tracking dynamics, showing how parents adapt practices based on perceived value and life transitions.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Quantitative dataset: 60 parents, 71 children, 372.19 average tracking days per child.
  • Qualitative dataset: 20 interviews re-analyzed for adoption, use, and abandonment themes.
  • Metrics: Frequency of entries, number of categories tracked, timing of adoption and abandonment.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Skewed participant demographics (white, affluent, highly educated, female-identifying).
  • Focus on Huckleberry app may not generalize to other baby-tracking technologies.
  • Future research should explore tracking practices in diverse populations and other domains (e.g., chronic disease management).

Summary

This study investigates how parents adopt, use, and abandon baby-tracking technologies, using Huckleberry app logs and interviews. Parents’ tracking practices evolve dynamically, influenced by developmental milestones, perceived value, and life transitions like childcare changes. The findings reveal nuanced patterns of abandonment, including gradual and partial discontinuation, and highlight the importance of multifaceted tracking. Design recommendations include tailoring features for different adoption phases, supporting intermittent tracking, and facilitating selective abandonment to reduce caregiver burden. These insights extend to other personal informatics domains, emphasizing the need for adaptive and user-centered tracking technologies.