Technology offers new opportunities to support healthier food choices, particularly for individuals in low-income communities who face systemic barriers to obtaining nutritious, affordable groceries. We introduce a novel conceptual model of grocery planning that frames food purchasing as a multi-objective optimization problem that considers cost, nutrition components, and a consumer's personal dietary goals. Guided by Zimmerman’s model of Self-Regulated Learning and prior research on food agency, we designed the Food Information System, a planning tool that provides optimized product recommendations aligned with users’ goals by integrating store inventory, prices, and nutritional data. We evaluated our system in an eight-week within-subjects intervention with 55 participants from a food-insecure community, followed by focus group sessions. While overall Healthy Eating Index scores remained largely stable, participants reported improved nutritional awareness and greater perceived agency in planning and purchasing groceries. We discuss design implications to support food agency by promoting long-term food literacy and by enhancing autonomy in making food choices.
Eating disorder (ED) is a psychiatric condition that involves behaviors like binge and restrictive eating with severe health consequences, particularly prevalent among young women. While technology interventions exist, they typically focus on retrospective reflection or general management, missing the time window when an ED behavior is taking place. In this work, we conducted co-design sessions with 22 young women experiencing EDs to develop ideas for Just-in-Time (JIT) interventions, followed by interviews with five experts specialized in ED treatment. We found that eating plays varied roles in participants' lives—from a means of gaining autonomy to automatic physiological responses—leading to design ideas including behavioral warnings, appetite management, food option redirection, psychological support systems, etc. By examining the characteristics of these designs with expert perspectives, we discuss what JIT support means for ED care and how to make it effective and sustainable.
Teenage years are a critical period for shaping food practices and health behaviors, yet teens remain underrepresented in research on future food and health technologies. This paper reports on design fiction workshops where 20 teens speculated on artifacts such as health-tracking mirrors and food-making machines while reflecting on their eating habits and values. Our analysis shows how teens negotiate their human stances in a techno-centric world, balancing excitement about innovation with concerns over health, control, and responsibility. We contribute to HCI by: (1) identifying teen-specific design considerations for reflective healthy-eating technologies, highlighting “absence” as a protective affordance; (2) reframing food technologies for teens as sites of family care and playful identity work, opening a design space at the intersection of reflection and play; and (3) advancing methodological understanding of youth-centered design fiction by showing how dual-mode speculative workshops can move teen participants beyond solutionist or anti-solutionist positions toward grounded negotiation with sociotechnical systems.
Gastric interoception influences eating behavior and emotions, making its modulation valuable for healthcare and human-computer-interaction applications. However, whether gastric interoception can be modulated noninvasively in humans remains unclear. While previous research indicates that abdominal-sound-driven haptic feedback resembles gut sensations, its impact on gastric feelings and gastric interoceptive behavior is unknown. We conducted three experiments totalling 55 participants to investigate how gut-sound-driven audio-haptic feedback applied to the stomach (1) affects user's feelings (2) influences perception of hunger and satiety levels and (3) influences gastric interoceptive behavior, quantified with Water Load Test-II. Results revealed that audio-haptic feedback patterns (a) induced the feelings of hunger, fullness, thirst, stomach upset, (b) increased hunger level, and (c) significantly increased volumes of ingested water. This work provides the first evidence that audio-haptic stimulation can alter gastric interoceptive behavior, motivating the use of noninvasive methods to influence users' feelings and behaviors in future applications.
Digital flavour modulation represents a significant research challenge within Human-Food Interaction. Previous work has focused on modulating basic tastes, while the modulation of trigeminal sensations such as spiciness and coolness remains underexplored. Spicy and cool substances contribute substantially to the sensory appeal of food and beverages; however, their overconsumption can have adverse health effects. To enhance these trigeminal flavours without chemical additives, this study proposes an integrated multimodal approach combining electrical tongue stimulation with congruent olfactory stimuli. Unlike unimodal methods, our approach leverages the interaction between direct neural stimulation and olfactory integration to selectively modulate distinct spiciness and coolness perception. Psychophysical experiments demonstrated that our method significantly enhanced perceived coolness through combination of electrical tongue stimulation and lemon odor, and significantly enhanced perceived spiciness of a spicy solution by electrical tongue stimulation. These findings suggest that our method expands design space for digital flavour modulation and contributes to healthier and more enriched eating and drinking experiences.
The sensation of a drink in the throat is a salient example of the internal bodily feelings that shape our eating experiences. Computationally modeling these sensations would enable their redesign and inform technologies that augment how we eat. However, methods for quantifying such subjective, internal states from objective cues remain underdeveloped. This paper introduces a computational approach to bridge this gap. A first study (N=31) models subjective ratings from laryngeal skin temperature and ingested volume, revealing distinct, individual Interoceptive Profiles. Informed by these findings, we developed a wearable device that provides thermal feedback to the larynx. A second study (N=20) demonstrates that this intervention can alter drink sensations, contingent on the user's sensory profile. Based on these findings, we highlight the potential of the larynx as a site for bidirectional interaction (sensing and modulating) and propose a novel approach for personalized sensory augmentation.
'How was your lunch?’ Even simple food talk reveals how people translate multisensory impressions into language, offering insights for HCI applications such as food recommendation and health management. While prior work has emphasised the multisensory nature of eating, less is known about the linguistic strategies through which people articulate such experiences. We conducted a mixed-methods study combining self-reports and interviews to examine how non-verbal sensory input is transformed into verbal expression. Our analysis shows that participants structured their accounts through temporal phases that integrated perception, cognition, affective reaction, and behaviour; employed associative strategies that shaped expectations; and expressed ambivalence, where positive and negative evaluations coexisted in descriptions such as guilty pleasure. Building on these findings, we propose a lens that highlights the role of time, association, and evaluative language in food talk, enabling designers to translate everyday expressions into actionable insights for food-related HCI design.