Table 5.

Directions for future research.

Perspective	Future research direction	Description
Research design	Employment of longitudinal research designs	Investigate the influence variables corresponding to different usage stages; changes in the evolution of an individual’s acceptance level and self-disclosure over time [28,59,91,99].
Research design	User modalities: regular users, intermittent users, nonusers, and former users	Nonuser group: nonusers and their goal orientations and perceptions about the affordances [14,102] Former users: comparative studies with short-term and long-term users to identify barriers; people who effectively quit using web-based fitness communities and wearables [53,68] Intermittent users, nonusers, and former users [95]
Research topics	Issues related to data sharing and privacy	Data sharing: active sharing and comparing of digital activity data; employees’ attitudes about sharing data; browsing others’ tracking data and sharing one’s own tracking data; means of sharing health-tracking records [8,27,56,104] Privacy and security: personal data privacy and security challenges; privacy awareness; perceived risks around data privacy for employees [27,59,105]
Research topics	Psychological and behavioral aspects of self-tracking	Dependent variables: willingness to make in-app purchases; personal health information management; underlying motivations; decisions of consumers to adopt a self‐tracking technology [61,81,86] Independent variables: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, health literacy, duration of self-tracking, number of devices, level of analysis, and demographic characteristics [10,43,55] Moderator variables: individual characteristics and personality types [60]
Research topics	Self-tracking in clinical use	Health-tracking data and patient–doctor relationship: whether and how the data are integrated into the patient–doctor relationship; patient–provider interactions with self-tracking data [101,103] Patients’ and doctors’ attitudes toward self-tracking: exploring doctors’ communication needs and perspectives and patients’ experiences [99,103]