Efficient Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) management necessitates comprehensive tracking of various factors that influence blood sugar levels. However, tracking health data for children with T1D poses unique challenges, as it requires the active involvement of both children and their parents. This study aims to uncover the benefits, challenges, and strategies associated with collaborative tracking for children (ages 6-12) with T1D and their parents. Over a three-week data collection probe study with 22 child-parent pairs, we found that collaborative tracking, characterized by the shared responsibility of tracking management and data provision, yielded positive outcomes for both children and their parents. Drawing from these findings, we delineate four distinct tracking approaches: child-independent, child-led, parent-led, and parent-independent. Our study offers insights for designing health technologies that empower both children and parents in learning and encourage the sharing of different perspectives through collaborative tracking.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642344
Understanding how social situations unfold in people's daily lives is relevant to designing mobile systems that can support users in their personal goals, well-being, and activities. As an alternative to questionnaires, some studies have used passively collected smartphone sensor data to infer social context (i.e., being alone or not) with machine learning models. However, the few existing studies have focused on specific daily life occasions and limited geographic cohorts in one or two countries. This limits the understanding of how inference models work in terms of generalization to everyday life occasions and multiple countries. In this paper, we used a novel, large-scale, and multimodal smartphone sensing dataset with over 216K self-reports collected from 581 young adults in five countries (Mongolia, Italy, Denmark, UK, Paraguay), first to understand whether social context inference is feasible with sensor data, and then, to know how behavioral and country-level diversity affects inferences. We found that several sensors are informative of social context, that partially personalized multi-country models (trained and tested with data from all countries) and country-specific models (trained and tested within countries) can achieve similar performance above 90% AUC, and that models do not generalize well to unseen countries regardless of geographic proximity. These findings confirm the importance of the diversity of mobile data, to better understand social context inference models in different countries.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642444
Mindfulness meditation has vast benefits, yet is challenging for many. We designed a novel targeted warmth somaesthetic wearable and evaluated how the thermal sensation is perceived during meditation. In a qualitative study, twenty participants explored the wearable during meditation. Findings reveal participants' rich experiences, sensations, and feelings. They perceived the technology as an appropriate tool for self-exploration. Even when participants initially felt the wearable was distracting their meditation process, they easily learned how to leverage it in their introspection process. We report on four potential roles for warmth technology: functional (pulling focal of attention), behavioral (motivating to "get back to the practice"), emotional (comforting during the lonely process), and therapeutic feelings. We conclude with design guidelines, highlighting that warmth is a promising technology for meditation if designed to encourage self-exploration of body sensations and emotions while not compromising the natural meditation practice.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642557
The menopause transition has a direct impact on half of the global population, yet it has continued to be a stigmatised topic with limited focus on supporting it with technology. Whilst attention being given to menopause in HCI may be new, people experiencing it is not and people have adopted, adapted and appropriated technologies to support their menopause journey. In this questionnaire and interview study, we examine how people in the UK are using (and not using) existing general and menopause-specific technology to support themselves through the transition. Despite limited menopause-specific technologies available, participants have found novel uses of technologies such as social media and smartwatches for 1) connecting and sharing, 2) information seeking, 3) tracking and reflecting, and 4) self-care. This work contributes design considerations for menopause specific technologies, and design opportunities and challenges for technologies that can be appropriated to support menopause.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642694
Poorly managed postoperative acute pain can have long-lasting negative impacts and pose a major healthcare issue. There is limited investigation to understand and address the unique needs of patients experiencing acute pain. In this paper, we tackle this gap through an interview study with 14 patients who recently underwent postoperative acute pain to understand their challenges in pain self-management and their need for supportive tools. Our analysis identified various factors associated with the major aspects of acute pain self-management. Together, our findings indicated that tools for supporting these patients need to carefully consider information and support delivery to adapt to rapid changes in pain experiences, offer personalized and dynamic assistance that adapts to individual situations in context, and monitor emotion when promoting motivation. Overall, our work provided valuable knowledge to address the less-investigated but highly-needed problem of designing technology for the self-management of acute pain and similar health conditions.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642916
Drawing upon theories from communication studies and cognitive psychology, this research develops a multitheoretical model that identifies human and technological factors that predict social media distraction engagement and explains how social media distractions can lead to negative consequences across various tasks. This model is empirically tested using data from a survey of U.S. mobile phone users (N = 1,026). The results from a structural equation modeling analysis support the model’s predictions that a person’s age, fear of missing out, smartphone checking habit strength, and the number of social media applications with notifications enabled all impact a variety of distraction behaviors and consequences. The findings show that communication technology distraction behavior is influenced by a complex intertwining of goal-driven communication and information-seeking behaviors, automatic processes in the brain, and technology affordances.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641950
Running and jogging are popular activities for many visually impaired individuals thanks to the relatively low entry barriers. Research in HCI and beyond has focused primarily on leveraging technology to enable visually impaired people to run independently. However, depending on their residual vision and personal preferences, many chose to run with a sighted guide. This study presents a comprehensive analysis of the partnership between visually impaired runners and sighted guides. Using a combination of interaction and thematic analysis on video and interview data from 6 pairs of runners and guides, we unpack the complexity and directionality of three layers of vocal communication (directive, contextual, and recreational) and distinguish between intentional and unintentional corporeal communication. Building on the understanding of the importance of synchrony we also present some exploratory data looking at physiological synchrony between 2 pairs of runners with different level of experience and articulate recommendations for the HCI community.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642388
Online platforms provide support for many kinds of distress, including suicidal thoughts and behaviors. However, because many platforms restrict suicidal talk, volunteers on these platforms struggle with how to help suicidal people who come for support. We interviewed 11 volunteer counselors in a large online support platform, including after they role-played conversations with varying severities of suicidality, to explore practices and challenges when identifying and responding to suicidality. We then presented Speed Dating design concepts around emotional preparation and support, real-time guidance, training, and suicide detection. Participants wanted more support and preparation for conversations with suicidal people, but were conflicted about AI-based technologies, including trade-offs between potential benefits of conversational agents for training and limitations of prediction or real-time response suggestions, due to the sensitive, context-dependent decisions that volunteers must make. Our work has important implications for nuanced considerations and design choices around developing digital mental health technologies.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641922
Current approaches to designing technologies for stroke rehabilitation at home show great promise using either mindfulness-based interventions or embodied tangible interactions. However, there is an untapped potential in integrating these approaches and a lack of understanding of how to embody aspects of mindfulness in tangible interactions for stroke rehabilitation. We report the first explicit effort to explore this dimension by conducting semi-structured interviews and co-design sessions involving four physiotherapists and four mindfulness experts. The major themes ‘Awareness – The essence of mindfulness’ and ‘Tactile sensations – A pathway to mindfulness’ point us towards new ways to embody mindfulness in tangible interactions to address stroke rehabilitation challenges. This work introduces a novel approach to designing technology called ‘Mindfulness-based Embodied Tangible Interactions’ (MBETI). We present five key design principles such as 'Design to support mindful awareness’ and ‘Design for Comfort’ while discussing the future research opportunities of assistive technologies for stroke rehabilitation.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642463
Psychedelic-assisted therapy has shown significant promise in alleviating treatment-resistant mental illness, prompting excitement among people with lived experience of mental illness. The emerging collective perception of psychedelics as tools for mental health has been dubbed the Pollan Effect. We investigate whether the Pollan Effect carries to online community discussions concerning psilocybin-containing mushrooms (PCMs). Through a matched computational analysis of 676,875 longform Reddit posts describing PCM use spanning a decade, we provide evidence of the Pollan Effect in terms of increased health discourse around PCMs following two inception points---release of a book and subsequent documentary on PCMs. We then introduce the notion of a Pollan shift, which we witness through increased collective sharing of emotional and social experiences following the two inception points. Our findings offer insights into how online discourse could be representative of emerging social movements around new psychiatric treatments, and the role of platforms in sensemaking and research.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642477
The need for AI systems to provide explanations for their behaviour is now widely recognised as key to their adoption. In this article, we examine the problem of trustworthy AI and explore what delivering this means in practice, with a focus on healthcare applications. Work in this area typically treats trustworthy AI as a problem of Human–Computer Interaction involving the individual user and an AI system. However, we argue here that this overlooks the important part played by organisational accountability in how people reason about and trust AI in socio-technical settings. To illustrate the importance of organisational accountability, we present findings from ethnographic studies of breast cancer screening and cancer treatment planning in multidisciplinary team meetings to show how participants made themselves accountable both to each other and to the organisations of which they are members. We use these findings to enrich existing understandings of the requirements for trustworthy AI and to outline some candidate solutions to the problems of making AI accountable both to individual users and organisationally. We conclude by outlining the implications of this for future work on the development of trustworthy AI, including ways in which our proposed solutions may be re-used in different application settings.
Mental health disorders are prevalent worldwide, yet they remain stigmatized, especially in the Middle East. While mHealth has the potential to circumvent traditional barriers, research on its application remains scarce in Arab countries. To address this gap, we conducted a mixed-methods study of mental health apps availability, adoption, and perceptions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) where digital health transformation is rapidly progressing. We interviewed twelve psychiatrists and psychologists to elicit their views on local barriers and opportunities for digital mental health support. We further systematically reviewed the Saudi app market, analysing 110 Arabic mental health apps. Our findings indicate that whilst fear of stigma and cultural factors hindered help-seeking, the privacy and anonymity enabled by technology created new opportunities for accessing mental support in the KSA. We revealed tensions between experts' professional and practical perspectives, explored technology-exacerbated challenges and provided considerations for improving Saudi digital mental healthcare experience.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642642
Older adults, especially those living alone, are less likely to meet recommended physical activity levels than other age groups. How- ever, current physical activity promoting technologies have seen low uptake among older adults, likely due to poor attention to their unique needs. To understand the perspectives of older adults living alone towards physical activity, including their motivations for and the challenges encountered in maintaining routines, we conducted a qualitative study with 17 participants. Through thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews and diaries, we reveal their diverse motivations for engaging in physical activity while also detailing how their intentions and routines are habitually disrupted by multi- dimensional and interrelated barriers, including changing personal and environmental circumstances, lack of stimulus to maintaining motivation, and limited access to resources. We suggest future PA promoting technologies to leverage social interaction to develop commitments and employ a holistic design approach to addressing the interplay between the barriers.
doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642842