Internet addiction emerges as a substantial health and well-being issue in children. Research suggests that software-mediated interventions may help address the problem; however, there is a gap in investigating the designs and considerations from the perspectives of children and parents, who are the primary stakeholders. The present study aims to co-design digital tools to protect young children from internet addiction. We involved 24 participants (children and parents) in 3 serial workshops: (1) conceptualising potential efforts through focus group discussion, (2) designing digital tools through card-based ideation, and (3) evaluating ideas through mixed-method testing. Our study contributes to conceptualising seven themes of potential efforts and producing 18 digital tool features categorised into eight functions. We discovered the promising potential of digital tools as parent-child dyadic interventions to encourage real-world interests, promote positive online activities, schedule balanced activities, provide online rules as playful missions with constructive consequences, and assist parental mediation decision-making.

Auditory features like voice pitch and speech style significantly influence human-computer interaction, especially in driving where voice assistants provide real-time guidance. This study examined how two voice pitches (Alto and Bass) and two speech styles (Casual and Frozen) affected drivers’ cognitive and emotional responses. Eighty-four participants in a driving simulator received voice reminders from an assistant with varied auditory features while stress, heart rate variability, emotions, and task performance were recorded. Cognitive load was assessed using the NASA-TLX questionnaire. Results showed that the Frozen speech style combined with Alto pitch triggered higher stress and cognitive load, while speech style had a stronger effect than pitch on emotions. These insights aid in designing user-friendly voice assistants that reduce driver stress and improve safety. Future studies should investigate long-term effects and individual auditory differences.

This paper presents the co-design process of a digital tool that may prevent or alleviate feelings of loneliness in older adults. Six workshops were conducted with older adults (n = 34) aged between 65–80 years old to investigate the role of technology in maintaining and establishing meaningful relationships. Participants’ contributions throughout the workshops were used to inform the design and development of a web-based loneliness intervention for older adults called ElderConnect. ElderConnect is a web-based application that supports older adults to identify, prevent, and alleviate feelings of loneliness by providing knowledge and strategies to initiate new social connections and maintain existing connections. Several challenges were identified while co-designing the application with older adults, and suggestions are provided in this paper to overcome such challenges. The study highlights how to include older adults’ concerns regarding technologies within an iterative co-design process, leading to an endorsed final product.

The Global South is a reference to the underdeveloped regions of the world and though it is often synonymous with the marginalisation of people through living standards and access to resources, not everyone falls under this margin. The children in the margins in the Global South encompasses those with little or no access to modern communication, technologies and academic resources. This spectrum also includes children with learning and developmental disabilities, mental and physical health issues and hostile home or school environments. Marginalization in the Global South places a significant portion of the children at an elevated risks of inequality from lack of access, knowledge and training of ICTs to digital exclusion. Moreover, the recent global pandemic has exacerbated these challenges. This workshop aims at tracing research lines and questions around methodological and technological in designing tools to support children on the margins in the Global South.

Childhood cancer is a deadly illness that requires the young patient to adhere to cancer treatment for survival. Sadly, the high treatment side-effect burden can make it difficult for patients to keep up with their treatment. However, childhood cancer patients can manage these treatment side effects through daily self-care to make the process more bearable. This paper outlines the design and development process of a multimedia-based solution to motivate these young patients to adhere to cancer treatment and manage their treatment side effects. Due to the high appeal of multimedia-based interventions and the proficiency of young children in using mobile devices, the intervention of this study takes the form of a virtual pet serious game developed for mobile. The intervention which is developed based on the Protection Motivation Theory, includes multiple game modules with the purpose of improving the coping appraisal of childhood cancer patients on using cancer treatment to fight cancer, and taking daily self-care to combat treatment side-effects. The prototype testing results show that the intervention is well received by the voluntary play testers. Future work of this study includes the evaluation of the intervention developed with childhood cancer patients to determine its effectiveness.

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) can bridge real-world physical objects with the digital world, which is beneficial for children with ASD. However, at present, most TUIs have been developed for children in affluent countries. Hence, this paper presents the evaluation of a TUI designed to support children with ASD in a low-resource country. The main objective of this study is to explore the initial usability of the proposed prototype among children with ASD and identify potential improvements to enhance the usability of the intervention. The preliminary evaluations were conducted with 20 Sri Lankan children with ASD and their special education teachers. This study identified four lessons for designing TUI such as including audio prompts to enhance tangible interactions, designing the structure of the tangibles to avoid fingers touching the iPad, add appropriate helper cues in graphical interchange format, and avoid having multiple tangibles with similar properties. Findings of this study lead to several design guidelines for developing affordable TUIs for children with ASD.

Abstract At present, technology is being extensively used among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in affluent countries. However, there is a lack of studies exploring the use of technology for children with ASD in developing countries. This study, therefore, investigates the current role of technology for children with ASD in Sri Lanka where the autism prevalence is 1 in 93 children in the age group of 0–3. This qualitative study utilized semi-structured interviews and focus group sessions with 32 parents and 18 practitioners who work closely with children with ASD. The findings of this study indicate that a wide array of technological applications (n = 37) is used among children with ASD in Sri Lanka at home and therapy settings. This study further identifies different patterns of using technology at home and in therapy settings. For instance, parents mostly use passive learning technologies such as television and YouTube channels on smartphones to educate children with ASD in home settings. On the other hand, practitioners use interactive technologies such as desktop computer programs and tablet applications to develop skills and engage with children with ASD. Though many technological applications are used among Sri Lankan children with ASD, parents and practitioners illustrated that current technological applications need to be further improved and modified to cater for the needs of children with ASD and to make learning more effective. We also found out that having flexible customization can be a powerful tool when designing software applications for children with ASD in Sri Lanka. Finally, we present the implications for designing technologies for children with ASD highlighting the similarities and differences of our findings with those studies conducted in affluent countries. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS Digital technology such as TV and desktop computers are widely used among children with ASD in Sri Lanka. Most parents of children with ASD use passive learning technologies (i.e. TV), while practitioners use more interactive technologies such as tablets and computers. The most common use of technology at home is to teach academic skills (i.e. vocabulary and maths), while the most common use of technology at therapy is for sensory integration. Applications supporting Sri Lankan cultural context is one of the popular functionality required by both parents and practitioners of children with ASD. Customization can be a key feature when designing software applications for children with ASD in non-English speaking multilingual countries like Sri Lanka.

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often have impairments in social interactions with peers. Digital technology, in the form of computerized applications, can be used as a remedy for this, even though there is a paucity of such applications in low-resource regions like Sri Lanka. Therefore, we conducted co-design workshops to develop tablet applications to improve social interactions of children with ASD in Sri Lanka. 18 experienced practitioners who work closely with children with ASD in Sri Lanka participated in the workshops and co-designed two prototypes called Picture to Object Matching Application (POMA) and Word to Picture Matching Application (WPMA). We present the design process along with the insights gained from the workshops, which we believe are valuable for designing software applications for children with ASD in Sri Lanka.

In this paper, we describe the iterative design and exploratory evaluation of ‘Amail’, an email tool designed for persons with aphasia. It is inspired by interviews with persons with aphasia and their partners and has been improved through discussions with experienced speech therapists. Our user studies show that aphasics find current email communication tools too challenging to use. The most pronounced barrier is the lack of writing support. Based on these findings, we designed an email application with language support and limited functionality that is easier to use than existing solutions. The email program has been evaluated in two complementary ways: (i) by collecting system logs as objective data and (ii) by conducting questionnaires and interviews with aphasics to understand their opinions, expectations and concerns. Our evaluation confirms that aphasics find the email tool easy to use and the language support is indeed a substantial help when composing emails. Moreover, participants demonstrated an increased confidence when composing messages using Amail. Suggestions for adaptations that could further improve the support for the target group were also collected.

In this paper we present the design of an application that supports conversational storytelling for people with aphasia. Camelendar is a touch screen application that supports people with aphasia in expressive storytelling. Camelendar utilizes photos to support people with aphasia talking about their daily activities; participants of the conversation (including the aphasic person) add comments and detailed information to the photos, enriching the story each time it is told. By arranging photos visually on a calendar people with aphasia can navigate to photos of events they want to talk about. The photos of the events transform into stories by adding tags and comments directly on the photos.

In this paper we present the design of an image capturing device for persons with aphasia. The early concepts were validated with one speech therapist and the usability of the camera was tested with one aphasic person. Our semi-autonomous hand-held camera, tapered to meet specific interaction and ergonomic needs of expressive aphasics. This camera is able to capture daily experiences by creating photographs that receives significant, automatically added tags. We present the design case study with early evaluation results by proxy users.

This paper outlines the design requirements of a GPS car navigation system for the elderly and the young by proposing a set of new guidelines for designing such systems. Our study revealed that younger drivers had a more positive user experience as compared to the elderly drivers. This paper also identifies a number of advanced features that a routing system should have for satisfying both the elderly and younger drivers on road. In conclusion, we will discuss the key design recommendations that were derived from the study.

In this paper we present an application that helps to motivate the elderly in maintaining an independent healthy life style. With this application elderly people don't need to memorize the details --- they will be informed round the clock about their diet and exercise schedules-freeing their memory for something else. The application was designed and implemented in a participatory manner. The early results from the evaluation show that the application has potential in enabling the elderly to maintain a healthy life style.

This paper discusses a design case, which explores the potential of psychophysiological measures as an input technique for social gaming applications intended for children. aMAZEd is an example of a tabletop mixed reality game that supports social interaction between players through and around the game. It is clear that sensing technology used to obtain psychophysiological measures needs to be improved and there is still a range of solutions that need to be explored. However, our experience shows that psychophysiological input appeals to children and can be a fun element of games supporting social interaction among players.

Robots can exhibit life like behavior, but are according to traditional definitions not alive. Current robot users are confronted with an ambiguous entity and it is important to understand the users perception of these robots. This study analyses if a robot's intelligence and its agreeableness influence its perceived animacy. The robot's animacy was measured, amongst other measurements, by the users' hesitation to switch it off. The results show that participants hesitated three times as long to switch off an agreeable and intelligent robot as compared to a non agreeable and unintelligent robot. The robots' intelligence had a significant influence on its perceived animacy. Our results suggest that interactive robots should be intelligent and exhibit an agreeable attitude to maximize its perceived animacy.

Robots are being introduced in our society but their social status is still unclear. A critical issue is if the robot's exhibition of intelligent life-like behavior leads to the users' perception of animacy. The ultimate test for the life-likeness of a robot is to kill it. We therefore conducted an experiment in which the robot's intelligence and the participants' gender were the independent variables and the users' destructive behavior of the robot the dependent variables. Several practical and methodological problems compromised the acquired data, but we can conclude that the robot's intelligence had a significant influence on the users' destructive behavior. We discuss the encountered problems and the possible application of this animacy measuring method.