Harnessing Home IoT for Self-tracking Emotional Wellbeing: Behavioral Patterns, Self-reflection, and Privacy Concerns

The home environment plays a critical role in shaping daily routines that influence emotional wellbeing. While previous research has leveraged mobile and wearable devices to track emotional wellbeing indicators, these approaches often suffer from limited adherence and data gaps when users are not actively engaged. To address this, we further explore home IoT sensing as a passive and unobtrusive modality for monitoring emotional wellbeing. We conducted a four-week user study (N=20), collecting data from mobile devices, wearables, and home IoT sensors. Our quantitative analysis showed that incorporating home IoT data better captured associations between domestic routines and emotional wellbeing than mobile and wearable data alone. However, domestic activity patterns varied significantly across participants, highlighting the personalized nature of domestic routines. To further investigate these differences, we developed an informatics tool for participants to visualize and reflect on their behavioral data. Semi-structured interviews revealed that participants found home IoT data intuitive and insightful in understanding their emotional wellbeing, leading to a positive shift in privacy concerns. Our findings highlight home IoT sensing as a promising tool for tracking emotional wellbeing and provide design implications for future sensor-enabled home healthcare services.