Informatics Ph.D. student Clara Caldeira presented a paper, “Routine Self-tracking of Health: Reasons, Facilitating Factors, and the Potential Impact on Health Management Practices,” which took third place at the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 2017 Annual Symposium Student Paper Competition in Washington, D.C., at the beginning of November. The paper was co-authored by fellow Ph.D. studentMayara Costa Figueiredo, as well as Informatics Professors Yunan Chen and Kai Zheng. The paper uses data from the Pew Survey on Tracking for Health to examine the patterns of self-tracking activity to understand reasons for this behavior and its impact on health management practices. This year, AMIA selected five papers led by Ph.D. students in the Health and Information (HAI) Lab within UCI’s Department of Informatics.

The AMIA Annual Symposium is a multidisciplinary organization that actively supports informatics professionals and students in five key areas of their research and practice: translational bioinformatics, clinical research informatics, clinical informatics, consumer health informatics and public health informatics. The AMIA Student Paper Competition is held annually at the AMIA Annual Symposium.  Student papers are selected by the Scientific Program Committee and forwarded to the Student Paper Advisory Committee, which nominates eight finalist papers for presentation during the meeting. Based on a combination of the quality of the written paper and the subsequent clarity of the oral presentation, the judges select first, second and third place award winners in recognition of the best student papers.