Effective communication between older adult care recipients and unpaid caregivers is essential to both care partners' well-being. To understand communication in care relationships, we conducted a two-part study with older adult care recipients and caregivers. First, we conducted a two-week diary study to gain insight into care-related communication challenges. While caregivers discussed the benefits of emotional attachment, care recipients expressed concerns about emotional fluctuation and losing autonomy. These findings, along with literature on self-disclosure and conversational scaffolding informed our design of CareJournal—a voice-based conversational agent that supports care-related disclosure between care partners. We evaluated CareJournal with 40 care partners to inform future design considerations and learn more about their communication practices. Our findings highlight the impact of distance and tensions between care and independence, providing insight into how care partners imagine computer-mediated care communication impacting their relationships.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642163
Many people prefer not to think about their own death, let alone talk about it. This contributes to fear of death and reduces the acceptance of its inevitability. We hypothesized that talking about one’s own death with a specially designed chatbot reduces fear of death and strengthens the confidence to discuss the topic further with loved ones. Participants (N=100) talked with the chatbot for an average of 25 minutes. It offered conversations about planning for one's own death, end-of-life preferences, and hopes for the afterlife. We measured participants’ fear and acceptance of death (DAP-R questionnaire) and readiness for end-of-life conversation (REOLC questionnaire) before and after the chat. Overall, attitudes toward death improved and fear decreased, while readiness for end-of-life conversations increased. Bigger changes in attitude corresponded with longer, more reflective responses in the conversations, commitment to plans, finding meaning in death, and some notion of legacy or afterlife.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642421
Migration and aging-related dilemmas have limited the opportunities for late-life migrants to rebuild social connections and access support. While research on migrants has drawn increasing attention in HCI, limited attention has been paid to the increasing number of late-life migrants. This paper reports a qualitative study examining the social connections and support of late-life migrants. In particular, drawing on the social convoy model, we pay specific attention to the dynamic changes of late-life migrants' social convoy, the supporting roles each convoy plays, the functions ICT plays in the process, as well as the encountered challenges and expectations of late-life migrants regarding ICT-supported social convoys. Based on these findings, we deeply discuss the role of the social convoy in supporting more targeted social support for late-life migrants, as well as broader migrant communities. Finally, we offer late-life migrant-oriented design considerations.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642898
Care work has long been relegated to private households and small communities, however, with the entry of digital marketplaces, it is becoming part of public economic spheres. While care work has been generally devalued and understudied, it is a complex practice embedded in a network of economic transactions, social relations, material conditions, and socio-cultural norms. This paper explores the care giving networks among migrant house-cleaners guided by Tronto’s ‘care ethics’ and Puig de la Bellacasa’s ‘matters of care’. We interviewed 19 Latino house-cleaners in Toronto to understand their care practices and networks. Our analysis identifies gaps in our participants’ care networks. We create a new term, lateral care, to explicate the digital communities of care practice our participants formed. We conclude with implications for the future design of technologies for labor economies that attend to concerns of care.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642200
There is increasing interest in how digitalisation variously impacts different socio-economic demographics’ ability to access, and realise benefits from, public services. Centring citizens’ lived experience in the identification of harms and benefits is critical for the evaluation of digital services, and more broadly for responsible innovation. Yet this poses significant challenges, particularly when engaging those living in precarious conditions. This paper reports on a study that engaged citizens living with poverty (n=76) to articulate harms arising from digitalisation in the context of an e-government social protection service. Interviews and surveys supported by speculative scenarios of ongoing changes helped surface and express citizen-centric harm characteristics within wider ecosystems before, during and after access, beyond a narrower service-lifecycle viewpoint. Drawing on the findings, we develop a taxonomy of harms and discuss how this can be utilised by HCI practitioners concerned with responsible innovation in digital welfare contexts.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642562
Text simplification refers to the process of increasing the comprehensibility of texts. Automatic text simplification models are most commonly evaluated by experts or crowdworkers instead of the primary target groups of simplified texts, such as persons with intellectual disabilities. We conducted an evaluation study of text comprehensibility including participants with and without intellectual disabilities reading unsimplified, automatically and manually simplified German texts on a tablet computer. We explored four different approaches to measuring comprehensibility: multiple-choice comprehension questions, perceived difficulty ratings, response time, and reading speed. The results revealed significant variations in these measurements, depending on the reader group and whether the text had undergone automatic or manual simplification. For the target group of persons with intellectual disabilities, comprehension questions emerged as the most reliable measure, while analyzing reading speed provided valuable insights into participants' reading behavior.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642570
Women from the Roma community experience significant health disparities during their pregnancy. Whilst Mobile Health (mHealth) technologies have the potential to improve antenatal care experiences and health outcomes, research on women from ethnically marginalised backgrounds in developed countries remains limited. We report on a series of Co-creation Workshops with 11 Roma women who have settled in the North of England. In this paper, we present thematic insights about their experiences and needs during pregnancy, and their perceptions and attitudes towards digital technologies to inform the design of culturally sensitive mHealth. We contribute to Human Computer Interaction (HCI) with new empirical research to discourses on Critical Digital Health, Intersectional HCI and Women-centred Design, highlight implications for design and encourage a more critical and intersectional design approach to accommodate better the experiences of ethnically marginalised groups whose needs arguably tend to be overlooked and stereotyped.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642584
This paper explores how FemTech platforms appropriate the term 'care' to create a collaborative, non-judgmental, and data-driven approach for a sexual and reproductive health condition like Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). In contrast, offline healthcare for PCOS is insufficient owing to disruptions in treatment, gynaecological indifference, and a lack of time and attention to patient concerns. We share findings from an ethnographic study conducted in India, involving interviews and observations with FemTech platform founders, gynaecologists, and people with PCOS. Our study highlights how FemTech start-ups, led by engineering and management professionals, establish a unified digital care approach by capitalizing on the shortcomings of traditional offline gynaecological healthcare infrastructures. We identify the logics of care surrounding FemTech platforms and assess their sustainability as digital alternatives to offline gynaecological care. We offer recommendations to FemTech founders and policymakers to build sustainable and inclusive offline and online health infrastructures.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642882