This study explores the phenomenon of energy and self-tracking technologies, moving beyond the context of managing chronic conditions. Our approach to designing from the experiences of people with disability is informed by crip theory, which challenges societal norms of health and ability. We analysed 50 survey responses and 15 interviews with wearable tracker users and found that self-tracking shapes interpretation of energy and self-care strategies. Our findings indicate that tracking significantly affect perceptions and judgments of bodily activity, energy and rest. We found a notable disconnect between the metrics provided by the trackers and the subjective understanding of personal energy meanings, especially during events of bodily and contextual changes such as travelling, illness, or menstrual cycle. This research contributes to discourses on energy in self-tracking technologies and advocates for designing more inclusive, crip futures for everyone that celebrate irregularity, fluctuation, and change, accommodating diverse bodily rhythms in energy tracking practices.

Energy limiting conditions (ELC), such as long COVID and ME/CFS, require the careful monitoring and pacing of activity and rest to avoid over-exertion. Commercially available fitness tracking technologies are currently being “misused” to manage these conditions. Based on co-design research with people with ELC, we conducted a research-through-design process to ideate upon what ELC pacing technologies could be. Our ongoing design process is informed by crip theories that highlight the social and political, rather than medical, aspects of disability and chronic conditions. In an attempt to offer non-medicalising pacing technologies, we explored integrating bronze casting as a jewelry making technique within the prototyping process. We also explore how we can present quantitative pacing data gathered from wearable sensors through felt vibrations on the body in a way that can be therapeutic and allow for the user to calibrate the quantitative data with their own felt sense of fatigue.

People with energy-limiting conditions, such as chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and Long COVID, need to limit their activity levels and balance exertion with rest and restorative activities. This practice is known as "pacing". There is an opportunity for technology to help people with this process, but conducting research with this population can be difficult given their limited and unpredictable energy levels. This research explores how we can use crip theory to inform the development of co-design methods suitable for this cohort, and as an analytical lens to explore how these tools should be designed outside of normative and abelist assumptions about fatigue and productivity. This is done through a 5 week Asynchronous Remote Community study utilising various co-design techniques. These findings point to future designs of pacing technologies and contribute insights about developing more accessible approaches to conducting research with people with energy-limiting conditions.

Long COVID is a new illness, and we still lack medical knowledge about possible treatments. This has led to the independent adoption of fitness tracking technologies for the management of long COVID. Through semi-structured interviews with 21 people with long COVID who used fitness tracking technologies, we found that fitness tracking devices were used to pace energy through finding correlations between activities and data, provide proof of illness to themselves, healthcare providers and friends and family, and to help gain a sense of agency and control during a new and enigmatic illness. Our findings support and extend design openings for the development of “pacing technologies”. These include the importance of customization and supporting the user in their recovery if appropriate, applying strategies for mitigating anxiety when tracking, facilitating the sharing of pacing data with friends and family and healthcare providers, and supporting users in identifying the optimal components of rest.

People with chronic illness often fluctuate between “good days” and “bad days” where symptoms are more or less severe depending on a range of factors and triggers. Our research contributes preliminary empirical knowledge on technology use during chronic illness depending on fluctuations in symptoms over time. We conducted a scoping study with people with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) to understand how their illness shapes how they use technologies in their everyday lives. This research contributes a timely HCI lens on the under-researched illness of ME/CFS, proposes the “trajectories of technology use” model that can be used to articulate how technologies are used during chronic illness, and points to design openings for technologies that are more accessible for people who experience chronic fatigue, sensory sensitivities and cognitive limitations. These design openings include non-screen-based technologies, and designing technologies that acknowledge and adapt to the changing body during fluctuations in symptoms.

Long COVID is a post-viral illness where symptoms are still experienced more than three months after an infection of COVID 19. In line with a recent shift within HCI and research on self-tracking towards first-person methodologies, I present the results of an 18-month long autoethnographic study of using a Fitbit fitness tracker whilst having long COVID. In contrast to its designed intentions, I misused my Fitbit to do less in order to pace and manage my illness. My autoethnography illustrates three modes of using fitness tracking technologies to do less and points to the new design space of technologies for reducing, rather than increasing, activity in order to manage chronic illnesses where over-exertion would lead to a worsening of symptoms. I propose that these “pacing technologies” should acknowledge the interoceptive and fluctuating nature of the user's body and support user's decision-making when managing long-term illness and maintaining quality of life.

This paper traces different conceptions of the body in HCI and identifies a narrative from user to body, body to bodies, and bodies to more-than-human bodies. Firstly, this paper aims to present a broader, updated, survey of work around the body in HCI. The overview shows how bodies are conceptualized as performative, sensing, datafied, intersectional and more-than-human. This paper then diverges from similar surveys of research addressing the body in HCI in that it is more disruptive and offers a critique of these approaches and pointers for where HCI might go next. We end our paper with recommendations drawn from across the different approaches to the body in HCI. In particular, that researchers working with the body have much to gain from the 4th wave HCI approach when designing with and for the body, where our relationships with technologies are understood as entangled and the body is always more-than-human.

Contemporary self-tracking devices take forms that reflect particular cultures of self-tracking that emphasize clinical perspectives and numerical precision. In this pictorial, we explore alternative forms to speculate on other possible self-tracking cultures. We present how we involved experts on the relationship between the gut and the brain to inspire a design brief for an alternative gut tracking device. This led to the design of Loupe and Lightbox, which together operate to externalize gut biota for closer examination, aesthetic appreciation, and reflection on the self. The device represents an example of self-tracking as cultivation-building a longer-term relationship with the self as something to be nurtured, tended to, and cared about.

This paper offers first-steps guidance towards the development of a methodology that embodies theoretical proposals for a fourth-wave, 'entanglement' approach to HCI. We propose the removal of technologies and the documenting of their absence as a method. Removal disrupts habitual relationships with our everyday technologies, revealing otherwise hidden knowledges. Removal as a method exemplifies that "you don't know what you've got till it's gone". We apply removal to the case of menstrual cycle tracking in two ways: literally through two autoethnographies, and hypothetically through semi-structured interviews. We show how this method especially facilitates emotional, embodied and cultural knowledge of the lived experience of self-tracking and we unpack some opportunities, implications and limitations in its use. Finally, we present how this method might be adopted by others and propose cases in which removal as a method might be applicable to study of a wider range of technologies beyond self-tracking.

Existing self-tracking devices have been criticized for perpetuating a dualist, rather than phenomenological, understanding of the self as a separated mind and body. In this paper we answer calls for a phenomenological approach to the design of self-tracking devices. Ambient Cycle is a menstrual cycle tracking device that provides a continuous display of data in the home through coloured light. Through its design and long-term deployment, we found that a phenomenological approach facilitated; 1. the documentation of a diversity in subjective experiences of the enigmatic menstrual cycle; 2. the tracking of positive as well as negative aspects of the menstrual cycle, which challenges wider understandings of the body in society, and 3. novel uses of self-tracked data. We also expand on existing uses of phenomenological theories within HCI to include those that address interactions with the insides of our bodies.

As self-tracking practices continue to proliferate, there has been a call for a consideration of how the design of these devices influence the users experience of themselves and their bodies beyond utility, efficacy and accuracy. The research product Ovum was designed to facilitate a DIY, shared, domestic experience, rather than an expert-led, individual, clinical experience of fertility tracking. Ovum uses the method of saliva sampling to determine ovulation. This paper unpacks the findings from a three-month long deployment of Ovum with seven couples trying to conceive. Besides an evaluation of the device in terms of the three experiential qualities aimed for in the design process, we report on the consequences of executing a design deployment that resembles a clinical trial. We contribute our experience in order to develop an understanding of how designing for the body places interaction designers in novel and complex situations.

Medical devices are moving out of the clinic and into the home. The design of these devices shapes our experience of interacting with our bodies. We attend to ovulation tracking devices that aid conception. We present Ovum; a research product that will be deployed in a long-term, qualitative study with couples trying to conceive. The contributions of this pictorial are the framing of the design space around at-home ovulation tracking devices and the presentation of our approach to this design space through working with oppositional experiential qualities by designing for fertility tracking as a shared, domestic and do-it-yourself experience.

For over 50 years, hormone-based contraceptives have allowed women to control their fertility, thus reconfiguring society and how women relate to their body. On the horizon are long-life microchip-based implanted contraceptives that can be turned on and off, which may further the societal disruptions of "the pill". Framed as interactive technology, we speculate on the design space of controllable implanted contraceptives. We explored existing implanted contraceptives through a performance ethnography of their implantation. Inspiration from this process informed a speculative video of living with controllable implants and a guide for healthcare professionals. These materials, along with expert presentations, backgrounded a design workshop in which participants unpacked issues around controllable contraceptive implants. Participants created and roleplayed physical mock-ups of controllers, manifesting discussions around security, relationships and hormones. Drawing from the outcomes of the workshop, we produce a speculative design in the form of a film and physical mock-ups.