Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often seek comfort from devices (e.g., smartphones) to deal with social overstimulation. However, such reliance exposes them to inappropriate digital content and increases susceptibility to mimicry and social vulnerability. Thus, parents having children with ASD encounter unique challenges in regulating their device usage, which are little addressed in the existing literature on parental mediation. As we begin to address this gap, we designed low-fidelity prototypes centered around open communication and self-regulation, which we refined based on the feedback from six ASD experts in two focus groups. We evaluated updated designs (presented in form of storyboards) through semi-structured interviews with 25 parents whose children with ASD (aged below 14) are active Internet users. Our study joins the body of work on parental mediation; our findings provide insights into inclusive parental control tools for children with ASD, and offer guidelines for future research in these directions.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642696
Managing Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM) is a significant challenge for pregnant individuals. Constant self-monitoring, emotional burden, and the short and long-term implications of GDM make the overall pregnancy experience challenging for these individuals, requiring action, learning, and lifestyle adjustment to manage the pregnancy properly. Prior literature on GDM mostly focuses on the medical and health management of the condition. However, pregnant individuals with GDM often must actively learn and adapt lifestyle strategies quickly without much support. Through semi-structured interviews with 13 pregnant individuals diagnosed with GDM, we investigate how these individuals experience, explore, learn, and reflect on ways to live with and manage GDM. Using Kolb's Learning Theory to analyze and structure our findings, we built on pregnant individuals' concrete lived experiences and uncovered the challenges as they navigate the GDM journey, managing their changing relationship with food and supporting emotional well-being while living with an often stigmatized condition in an at-risk pregnancy. Our study contributes to the discussion on the design opportunities to facilitate experiential learning of pregnant individuals' journey.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642674
Commercial wearables from Fitbit, Garmin, and Whoop have recently introduced real-time notifications based on detecting changes in physiological responses indicating potential stress. In this paper, we investigate how these new capabilities can be leveraged to improve stress management. We developed a smartwatch app, a smartphone app, and a cloud service, and conducted a 100-day field study with 122 participants who received prompts triggered by physiological responses several times a day. They were asked whether they were stressed, and if so, to log the most likely stressor. Each week, participants received new visualizations of their data to self-reflect on patterns and trends. Participants reported better awareness of their stressors, and self-initiating fourteen kinds of behavioral changes to reduce stress in their daily lives. Repeated self-reports over 14 weeks showed reductions in both stress intensity (in 26,521 momentary ratings) and stress frequency (in 1,057 weekly surveys).
https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642662
Videogames can transform the perspectives and attitudes of players. Prior discussion on this transformative potential has typically been limited to non-entertainment videogames with explicit transformational goals. However, recreational gaming appears to hold considerable potential for igniting deeply personal experiences of profound transformation in players. Towards understanding this phenomenon, we conducted an explorative autoethnographic study. For this, the first author played five narrative-driven videogames while collecting self-observational and self-reflective data of his experience during and outside gameplay. Our findings offer intimate insights into the trajectory and emotional qualities of personally meaningful and transformative videogame experiences. For example, we found that gameplay experiences that were initially perceived as bewildering or disorienting could evolve into more harmonious experiences laden with personal meaning. This shift in experience developed through different forms of subsequent re-engagement with initially discrepant game encounters.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642543
Bereavement causes unique challenges, and bereaved individuals can benefit from support during their grieving process. Grief theory emphasizes the importance of reflection during bereavement, and HCI has established that reflective technology can support well-being. However, it remains unclear how to provide bereavement support with reflective technology. We build on constructivist grief psychotherapies to investigate bereavement meaning-making as a focus for reflective technology. We study meaning-making in the context of the digital game GRIS, due to digital games' alignment with meaning-making. To understand the progression of meaning-making experiences, we conducted a qualitative diary and interview study: 11 bereaved individuals were interviewed on their bereavement experiences, played and completed diaries on GRIS, and were interviewed on their experiences engaging in meaning-making while playing. From these findings, we propose design recommendations for reflective technology to engage with individualized bereavement experiences, embed user agency within reflections, and focus on novel and anti-nihilistic reflections.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641968