Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing

This project seeks to characterize and understand the growing trend of abandoning personal health wearables, most notably pedometers and health tracking devices. To better understand the presentation of abandonment, we have analyzed of over 1600 Craigslist advertisements through iterative inductive and deductive analysis to tease out health motivations and rationales shared related to the abandonment of a suite of health tracking technologies. The outcome of this research is a call for improved theories to help translate between existing theories supporting psychological effects of health behavior change and the technologies that people utile to make those changes.