Trial Report The Unanticipated Use of Fitness Tracking Technologies During Post-COVID Syndrome, 2024, Homewood

Free:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3643834.3661617

Sarah Homewood, Kari Okholm Just, and Olivia Bramm Johansson. 2024. The Unanticipated Use of Fitness Tracking Technologies During PostCOVID Syndrome. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’24), July 01–05, 2024, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661617

ABSTRACT

Long COVID is a new illness, and we still lack medical knowledge about possible treatments.

This has led to the independent adoption of fitness tracking technologies for the management of long COVID.

Through semi-structured interviews with 21 people with long COVID who used fitness tracking technologies, we found that fitness tracking devices were used to pace energy through finding correlations between activities and data, provide proof of illness to themselves, healthcare providers and friends and family, and to help gain a sense of agency and control during a new and enigmatic illness.

Our findings support and extend design openings for the development of “pacing technologies”.

These include the importance of customization and supporting the user in their recovery if appropriate, applying strategies for mitigating anxiety when tracking, facilitating the sharing of pacing data with friends and family and healthcare providers, and supporting users in identifying the optimal components of rest.

CCS CONCEPTS
• Human-centered computing → Interaction design; Interaction design theory, concepts and paradigms. KEYWORDS long COVID, post-COVID syndrome, self-tracking, pacing, pacing technologies, chronic illness, chronic fatigue, fitness tracking, misuse, use, sensemaking

 

They are clearly too much of a burden. "Experts" who happen to be inconvenienced by such data debunking their claims know it best. You just can't trust objective data like that!

Then again, a few studies from biopsychosauruses have explicitly mentioned that their participants were reasonably active, hence debunking the deconditioning myth, and it somehow makes zero difference. The claims aren't made with any intent of being taken seriously, and almost no one cares when they aren't.

In the end all they have is a bunch of primary schoolyard taunts: buck-buck little chicken is afraid of a little activity buck-buck-bucka! And it somehow works. Good grief.