Using idle moments to record your health via mobile applications

As smart mobile phones permeate society, so too does the opportunity to use these technologies to unobtrusively capture patterns of daily life and interact with people in situ. The ability to record facets of daily life has given rise to the notion of the quantified self; researchers operating at the intersection of computer and social science are now seeking to understand how these mobiles' data can aide the design of health interventions and inform future psychological and social science research. However, current systems are not fully effortless: they require users to interrupt their activities in order to initiate the recording, annotation, or journaling of their experiences. Suitably seeking users' attention and incentivising them to engage with, for example, health applications, continues to be a main obstacle to the adoption of these services. In this work, we describe the design of a new application that seeks user feedback about their gastrointestinal health in an idle moment: when the user is sitting on the toilet. We describe the application's design, the health insights it provides (and, particularly, why it is not designed as a diagnostic tool), as well as early data that the system has collected. We close by discussing the opportunity that idle moments present for future health intervention applications.