Scoping the Landscape of Large Language Model-based Affective Personal Informatics: Review, Reflection, Future Direction
TL;DR
This synthesis of 45 papers published between January 2020 and June 2026 reveals an overreliance on multi-stage, text-centric pipelines, a predominance of active, screen-bound interactions, and a severe demographic skew toward young, university-campus-based cohorts in empirical evaluations.
Abstract
Affective personal informatics (PI) involves capturing, tracking, analyzing, and reflecting on personal data to support emotional self-awareness and mental well-being. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) are reshaping affective PI, yet a comprehensive survey of LLM-based affective PI systems is lacking. To bridge this gap, we systematically analyzed 45 papers published between January 2020 and June 2026 across four major computing and health databases, examining their macro trends, system taxonomies, and research methodologies. Our synthesis reveals an overreliance on multi-stage, text-centric pipelines, a predominance of active, screen-bound interactions, and a severe demographic skew toward young, university-campus-based cohorts in empirical evaluations. Based on these findings, we critically reflect on prevailing architectural and methodological shortcomings and outline actionable future directions for building end-to-end multimodal, low-burden, and inclusive affective PI systems.
