Family health informatics tools can help support well-being with shared data tracking. Prior work typically focused on shared data review, but often in specific moments, like bedtime, or centered on caregiving of children or elderly members. To investigate how tracking can support mutual health collaboration between family members pervasively across daily contexts, we designed and deployed FamilyBloom, a glanceable smartwatch and home display system for mood and goal tracking. Twelve families with both neurotypical and ADHD members used FamilyBloom for three months on average. Our findings reveal how family-centered tracking created collaboration opportunities and tensions across multiple ecological systems: individual self-regulation, collaborations within family dynamics, involvement of care networks with varying trust levels, institutional school constraints and cultural stigma, and temporality of regular routines and crisis periods. We discuss an ecosystem-aware approach to family informatics, wherein design can attend to how families navigate multiple contexts while sustaining family-level collaboration.

This paper presents a novel 3D system for human motion analysis - Motion Data Visualization and Annotation (MoViAn). Designed to provide a comprehensive visual representation of 3D human motion data, MoViAn incorporates detailed visualization of gaze direction, hand movements, and object interactions, alongside an interactive interface for efficient data annotation. A user study involving eight participants indicates that MoViAn enables users to thoroughly explore and annotate human motion data, with System Usability Scale (SUS) results demonstrating a satisfactory usability level. The contribution of this paper lies in the development of an interactive and usable data analytics tool aimed at deepening the understanding of human behaviors and intentions in various creative, cognitive, and physical activities that ultimately can facilitate the design and creation of innovative tools that enhance human life in multiple domains.

Family informatics often uses shared data dashboards to promote awareness of each other’s health-related behaviors. However, these interfaces often stop short of providing families with needed guidance around how to improve family functioning and health behaviors. We consider the needs of family co-regulation with ADHD children to understand how in-home displays can support family well-being. We conducted three co-design sessions with each of eight families with ADHD children who had used a smartwatch for self-tracking. Results indicate that situated displays could nudge families to jointly use their data for learning and skill-building. Accommodating individual needs and preferences when family members are alone is also important, particularly to support parents exploring their co-regulation role, and assisting children with data interpretation and guidance on self and co-regulation. We discuss opportunities for displays to nurture multiple intents of use, such as joint or independent use, while potentially connecting with external expertise.

Virtual Reality (VR) may improve mental health through immersive self-expression and relaxing environments. However, co-design for these outcomes is challenging due to participants' limited experience with VR and unfamiliarity with self-expression and relaxation techniques. In this paper, we proposed VRelax, a virtual environment that will be designed to support stress relief through self-expression. We are using OpenBrush as a technology proof to provide participants with a self-expression VR experience before co-design sessions. Smartwatches and inertial sensors are used to collect heart rate and accelerometer data to evaluate participants' stress levels during VR experience. We hypothesize self-expressive VR experience will foster participants’ creativity in designing relaxation environments, and the multimodal data collected could identify which parts of the VR experience are more relaxing or stressful. Our findings will have implications to improve the co-design sessions by using VR as a technology proof and improve the design of VR experiences for relaxation.

This paper presents a novel approach to co-designing an immersive virtual reality (VR) experience where users can participate in a guessability process for a full gesture-based user interface for 3D content interactions using hand controllers. The proposed VR system includes animated visual prompts to allow users to create their own gestures for 13 different object interactions. A pilot study with two participants demonstrated that the visual prompts helped users understand expected interactions and enhanced their creativity in gesture design while maintaining an enjoyable user experience. Hand motion data and user feedback were collected and will be analyzed to provide quantitative insights into gesture efficiency and economy. This paper contributes to developing an intuitive and interactive gesture-based interface for VR and sets the foundation for future studies with more participants to gather additional gesture design ideas.

The Human-computer Interaction (HCI) community has the opportunity to foster the integration of research practices across the Global South and North to begin overcoming colonial relationships. In this paper, we focus on the case of Latin America (LATAM), where initiatives to increase the representation of HCI practitioners lack a consolidated understanding of the practices they employ, the factors that influence them, and the challenges that practitioners face. To address this knowledge gap, we employ a mixed-methods approach, comprising a survey (66 respondents) and in-depth interviews (19 interviewees). Our analyses characterize a set of research perspectives on how HCI is practiced in/about LATAM; a set of driving forces and tensions with a heavy reliance on diasporic dynamics; and a set of professional demands and associated structural limitations. We also offer a roadmap towards building connections across HCI communities, in an attempt to rebuild HCI as a pluriverse.

Challenges associated with ADHD affect children’s daily routines and response to environmental stimuli, and support from parents is helpful in managing and overcoming behavior regulation challenges. Positive reinforcement is increasingly integrated into family technologies for teaching regulation skills, but typically support specific co-located activities. To better understand how technology can support co-regulation within families with ADHD children, we deployed CoolTaco, a smartwatch and phone system to support collaboration in creating tasks, gaining points for achieving them, and redeeming rewards. Ten families with ADHD children used CoolTaco in their daily routines. By qualitatively analyzing family interviews and usage logs, we find that smartwatches can help provide pervasive regulation support to children, but the division across devices and parent-child roles interfere with developing independence. We discuss how technology should support co-regulation while also fostering future self-regulation, such as by guiding children in goal setting and helping them reflect on progress and achievements.

Children with ADHD can experience a wide variety of challenges related to self-regulation, which can lead to poor educational, health, and wellness outcomes. Technological interventions, such as mobile and wearable health systems, can support data collection and reflection about health status. However, little is known about how ADHD children interpret such data. We conducted a deployment study with 10 children, aged 10 to 15, for six weeks, during which they used a smartwatch in their homes. Results from observations and interviews during this study indicate that children with ADHD can interpret their own health data, particularly at the moment. However, as ADHD children develop more autonomy, smartwatch systems may require alternatives for data reflection that are interpretable and actionable for them. This work contributes to the scholarly discourse around health data visualization, particularly in considering implications for the design of health technologies for children with ADHD.

Some neurodivergent people prioritize visual details over the “big picture”. While excellent attention to detail has many advantages, some contexts require the rapid integration of global and local information. A local processing style can be so strong that local details interfere with the fluid integration of global information required for processing of information rapidly displayed on user interfaces. This disconnect between context of an interaction and processing style can be termed local interference. Personalization of visual stimuli can promote a more accessible computing experience. We describe how technological interventions can support shifting of visual attention from local to global features to make them more accessible. We present two empirical studies. One study with one autistic adult revealed a significant shift in eye gaze fixation, and the other study with 20 autistic children revealed filters that visually emphasize primary aspects encouraged more global comments about the image content.

Adolescent and young adult childhood cancer survivors experience health complications, late or long-term biomedical complications, as well as economic and psychosocial challenges that can have a lifelong impact on their quality-of-life. As childhood cancer survivors transition into adulthood, they must learn to balance their identity development with demands of everyday life and the near- and long-term consequences of their cancer experience, all of which have implications for the ways they use existing technologies and the design of novel technologies. In this study, we interviewed 24 childhood cancer survivors and six caregivers about their cancer survivorship experiences. The results of our analysis indicate that the challenges of transitioning to adulthood as a cancer survivor necessitate the development and management of multiple societal, relational, and personal boundaries, processes that social computing technologies can help or hinder. This paper contributes to the empirical understanding of adolescent and young adult cancer survivors’ social experiences. We further contribute sociotechnical design provocations for researchers, designers, and community members to support survivors.

The design of wearable applications supporting children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD) requires a deep understanding not only of what is possible from a clinical standpoint but also how the children might understand and orient towards wearable technologies, such as a smartwatch. Through a series of participatory design workshops with children with ADHD and their caregivers, we identified tensions and challenges in designing wearable applications supporting the self-regulation of children with ADHD. In this paper, we describe the specific challenges of smartwatches for this population, the balance between self-regulation and co-regulation, and tensions when receiving notifications on a smartwatch in various contexts. These results indicate key considerations-from both the child and caregiver viewpoints-for designing technological interventions supporting children with ADHD.

Early instruction plays a crucial role in allowing toddlers to develop social, cognitive, and sensory-motor skills. Free play is important in any early development program, but designing activities for free play is challenging. In this paper, we investigate the use of an interactive surface, BendableSound, a fabric-based interactive surface that enables young children to play piano sounds when touching the fabric, and its potential value in early education classrooms. We conducted a 9-week exploratory study in which 22 toddlers and 5 teachers used BendableSound during free play activities inside their classroom. Our qualitative results indicate that BendableSound was successfully adopted and integrated in toddler classrooms and could positively impact cognitive, social, and physical development. These results offer implications for the design of deformable surfaces and for their integration in activities to support the early development of toddlers.

Child obesity and being overweight is a health problem of increasing occurrence. Sedentary lifestyles and lack of exercise affect young children’s motor skills development, hence their quality of life. This study presents the design and evaluation of Hunting Relics, a collaborative exergame to promote collective exertion in young children. The system runs on an interactive floor and was designed using an iterative user-centered methodology in combination with the Capability, Opportunity, and Motivation to generate Behavior (COM-B) model. To evaluate the impact of our design choices, two deployment studies were conducted. Results show that Hunting Relics augments existing exercise routines, keeps young children engaged for the long term, and persuades them to discover new collaborative practices to support exercising. A discussion follows about how the COM-B model is a useful framework to design exergames for young children and the impact of Hunting Relics from an educational, technical, and clinical perspective.

Children with autism found free play difficult. Free play is important for children with autism to help them develop social, communication, and expression skills. Interactive surfaces (IS) offer a casual and natural collaborative and engaging experience adequate to promote free play for children with autism. In this poster, we present the design and development of BendableSound, a fabric-based IS that allows children play music when tapping and touching on digital elements appearing on top of the fabric. To design BendableSound, we followed a user-centered design process involving interviewing, observation, and design sessions with caregivers. We close discussing directions for future work.

We present Fermat, an Intelligent Social Network for Mathematics Learning, which integrates an Intelligent Tutoring System as an extra feature to help students to improve the teaching and learning process. The intelligent tutor takes into account both cognitive and affective aspects. The social network and the affective tutoring systems are accessed from the web. Initial results in math show the benefits of using the tutoring system besides the all-known benefits of using a social network as the user interface.