This paper presents a literature review of human–computer interaction works on wearable systems for sports. We selected a corpus of 57 papers and analyzed them through the grounded theory for literature review approach. We identified five themes across the papers: the different research perspectives, the type of sports and sportspeople, the roles of wearables in sports, their wearability, and the different types of feedback. These themes helped us in delineating opportunities for future research: the investigation of different form factors and types of feedback; the consideration of different sportspeople and collaborative tasks; the need of pushing the boundaries of the sports domain; the exploration of the evolution of sports; the interconnection of different devices; and the increase of methodological rigor.

Although Personal Informatics stresses the importance of “self”-awareness and “self”-knowledge in collecting personal data, a description of the “self,” to which all these knowledge endeavors are addressed, is missing in the current debate. In this article we first review how the different theoretical assumptions that currently inform the design of Personal Informatics tools fail to convey a convincing image of the self, which ought to be quantified by these technologies. We then move on to the outline of a theory of the self that may ground the current discourse in Personal Informatics. Building on this theoretical framework, we propose a set of design guidelines as its implications, which may drive the design of future self-tracking technologies. Finally, we outline a research agenda, organized around such guidelines, in the form of research questions to be addressed in the future.

The majority of behavior change and persuasive technologies are exclusively addressed to modify a specific behavior. However, the focus on behavior may cloud the “existential aspects” of the process of change. To explore the lived and meaning-laden experience of behavior change, we interviewed 23 individuals who have used behavior change technology in their everyday life. The study findings highlight that behavior change is tied to meanings that point to existential matters, relates to a nexus of life circumstances, and unfolds over long periods of time. By contrast, the technology used by the participants appears mostly to focus on the present target behavior, ignoring its links to the participants’ life “context” and “time,” also providing scarce help for sense-making. Based on these findings, we surface a preliminary “existential model of behavior change,” identify several barriers that may prevent the modification of behavior and propose some design suggestions to overcome them.