TY - GEN
T1 - Soylent diet self-experimentation
T2 - 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017
AU - Dolejšová, Markéta
AU - Kera, Denisa
PY - 2017/2/25
Y1 - 2017/2/25
N2 - Quantified self-experimentation with personal diets is a popular activity among health enthusiasts, diagnosed patients, as well as "life hackers" pursuing self-optimization goals. In this paper, we reflect on self-experimentation practices in the context of amateur citizen science communities. We report findings from 11 month-long qualitative fieldwork in a community of nutrition hobbyists experimenting with a powdered food substitute "soylent". Our respondents customized the soylent powders to their personal needs, tracked their metabolic reactions to the diet, and discussed their findings with the online soylent user community. Although the data and knowledge sharing within the community positively impacted respondents' nutrition literacy, these activities created risks regarding their health safety and data privacy. We define soylent selfexperimentation as a form of "extreme citizen science". Based on the limitations identified in the soylent community, we suggest a set of design recommendations for extreme citizen science projects.
AB - Quantified self-experimentation with personal diets is a popular activity among health enthusiasts, diagnosed patients, as well as "life hackers" pursuing self-optimization goals. In this paper, we reflect on self-experimentation practices in the context of amateur citizen science communities. We report findings from 11 month-long qualitative fieldwork in a community of nutrition hobbyists experimenting with a powdered food substitute "soylent". Our respondents customized the soylent powders to their personal needs, tracked their metabolic reactions to the diet, and discussed their findings with the online soylent user community. Although the data and knowledge sharing within the community positively impacted respondents' nutrition literacy, these activities created risks regarding their health safety and data privacy. We define soylent selfexperimentation as a form of "extreme citizen science". Based on the limitations identified in the soylent community, we suggest a set of design recommendations for extreme citizen science projects.
KW - Extreme citizen science
KW - Health
KW - Nutrition literacy
KW - Risk
KW - Self-experimentation
KW - Selftracking
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85014744745&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2998181.2998365
DO - 10.1145/2998181.2998365
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AN - SCOPUS:85014744745
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW
SP - 2112
EP - 2123
BT - CSCW 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 25 February 2017 through 1 March 2017
ER -
