Routine Computing: A Systematic Review of Sensing Daily Life Dimensions Towards Human-Centered Goals
Provides a foundational framework for HCI researchers to design ethical, adaptive, and human-centered routine-aware systems.
This systematic review of 203 studies on routine computing proposes a taxonomy covering temporal structures, behavioral interactions, and cognitive aspects, identifying key challenges such as the gap between low-level activity recognition and high-level intent, and privacy concerns, to guide future human-centered system design.
Human routines structure daily life, yet remain challenging for computational systems to understand. This paper presents the first systematic review of routine computing, a previously implicit but increasingly recognized field that focuses on computationally sensing and modeling human behaviors. It synthesizes 203 studies published up to August 2025. The paper presents a new taxonomy of the literature, focusing on temporal structures, behavioral interactions, cognitive aspects, and how variability and deviations are addressed. The common goals of routine computing extend across four major application domains, including accessibility care, the promotion of healthy habits, adaptive and context-aware support, and large-scale population insights. Persistent challenges that limit the design of truly human-centered systems are identified, including the gap between low-level activity recognition and high-level intent, the tension between personalization and generalization, unresolved privacy concerns, and data-related limitations. By consolidating these findings, this paper provides a foundational framework for HCI researchers, outlining principles for designing ethical, adaptive, and human-centered routine-aware systems.