Everyday Disruptions to Goals: Implications for Wellbeing Technology

Paper Title

Everyday Disruptions to Goals: Implications for Wellbeing Technology

Publication Info

• Topic area: Understanding disruptions to personal health and wellbeing goals and their implications for designing adaptive wellbeing technologies.
• Keywords: wellbeing goals, personal informatics, disruptions, health behaviors, emotional burden, logistical burden, adaptive technology, resilience, goal adaptation, health technology design.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing health and wellbeing technologies assume stable routines and continuous engagement, failing to account for the diverse disruptions people face in pursuing their goals. These tools lack mechanisms to adapt to disruptions’ burden, temporality, and relevance.
• Significance: Addressing disruptions in goal pursuit can improve engagement with health behaviors, reduce abandonment of goals, and support recovery from adverse events, ultimately enhancing the effectiveness of wellbeing technologies.
• Motivation and related work: While prior research has explored barriers to health behaviors and adaptive technologies, disruptions are often treated as secondary findings or isolated cases. There is no systematic understanding of the types, frequency, and burdens of disruptions, nor how technologies should adapt to them.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A systematic characterization of disruptions to wellbeing goals, including their types, burdens, temporality, and relevance, to inform the design of adaptive wellbeing technologies.
• Novelty:
  1. Identification of eight types of disruptions (e.g., emotional/cognitive, physical/medical, financial).
  2. Analysis of four resulting burdens (emotional, logistical, physical, financial) and their prevalence.
  3. Examination of disruptions’ temporality (duration and frequency) and their impact on goal engagement.
  4. Design implications for adaptive wellbeing technologies based on disruptions’ characteristics.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  1. Conducted a survey of 149 US adults to collect data on wellbeing goals, disruptions, and their impacts.
  2. Used qualitative coding and descriptive statistics to categorize disruptions and analyze their burdens, duration, and frequency.
  3. Synthesized findings to propose design adaptations for wellbeing technologies.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Participants reported 558 unique disruptions across eight categories: physical/medical (17.9%), financial (19%), emotional/cognitive (17.4%), social interactions (15.2%), work (11.4%), family/household (7.2%), environmental (7.2%), and travel/recreation (5%).
  • Disruptions created four types of burdens: emotional (71.7% of disruptions), logistical (18.6%), physical (13.4%), and financial (9.3%).
  • Disruptions varied in duration: 29.1% lasted less than a day, 29.9% persisted for over a month, and the rest fell in between.
  • Disruptions were evenly distributed across recurrence frequencies (daily, weekly, monthly, sporadic). Emotional/cognitive disruptions recurred daily, while work disruptions were more often weekly.
• Advantage over baselines: Provides a comprehensive framework for understanding disruptions to wellbeing goals, addressing gaps in existing HCI and health technology literature by focusing on disruptions as a central design consideration.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Surveyed 149 US adults with diverse demographics.
  • Collected data on 426 wellbeing goals and 653 disruptions.
  • Analyzed disruptions’ types, burdens, and temporality using qualitative and quantitative methods.
• Limitations and future work:
  • The study focused on US adults, limiting generalizability to other cultural contexts.
  • The 48-hour recall window may have missed longer-term patterns of disruption.
  • Future work should explore disruptions in non-US contexts, use ecological momentary assessment (EMA) for finer-grained data, and examine how disruptions evolve over time.

Summary

This study systematically characterized disruptions to personal health and wellbeing goals, identifying eight types of disruptions and four resulting burdens. Disruptions varied in duration, frequency, and relevance to goals, with emotional and logistical burdens being the most common. The findings highlight the need for adaptive wellbeing technologies that account for disruptions’ burden, temporality, and scale. By tailoring interventions to users’ circumstances, such technologies can better support goal pursuit, recovery from disruptions, and sustained engagement with health behaviors. This research provides actionable insights for designing more resilient and adaptive health technologies.