Stigma around mental health significantly hinders help-seeking behavior among university students, especially international students and those of Asian heritage. Digital storytelling can address this stigma by allowing individuals to share personal experiences, dispel negative attitudes, and foster community. However, current platforms often miss opportunities to engage users actively and supportively. To address this, we designed and implemented Digital Human Library (DHL), a story-sharing platform prototype, through brainstorming sessions with HCI researchers and a mental health nurse. We conducted a week-long diary study and semi-structured interviews with 16 university students to assess DHL's impact on self-efficacy toward seeking mental health help. Thematic analysis revealed that trust in professionals' and peers' stories can enhance self-efficacy but may be hindered if stories lack rich contextual details. DHL's support for gradual engagement helps users overcome initial reservations about seeking professional help and effectively helps them to think about future next steps, including becoming the storyteller themselves. This study highlights the potential for DHL to support mental health storytelling and suggests design implications for future HCI and CSCW research, emphasizing the importance of integrating supportive and engaging elements in digital platforms.

Mental health problems are a serious concern among university students, and international students in Canada are known to be particularly vulnerable due to the underutilization of mental health services and unfamiliarity with Western approaches to mental health. However, international students' mental well-being remains underexplored in HCI. In this study, we conducted remote synchronous remote co-design sessions with 19 participants (14 international students, 5 mental health professionals) to understand concretely what types of designs for interactive technologies suit these students' mental health needs and challenges. Based on their brainstormed ideas and sketches, we produced a set of design dimensions that span different types of support, interaction, and safety. The dimensions were then used to develop a set of four medium-fidelity mockups that spanned these dimensions, presenting a diverse range of design features. Using these mockups, we elicited feedback in an online survey from the same participants. Findings suggest that the students negotiate a complex understanding of helpfulness, comfort, and trust when they consider what types of designs to consider using. Each mockup highlights different ways to support individual differences and preferences. Our work serves as a foundation for designing technologies that can ease issues with accessibility and be more inclusive of international students' cultural backgrounds.

Amidst increasing reports of mental health problems in Canadian university students, those of Asian descent have particularly struggled to seek out services due to cultural barriers. Counselling practices have long noted that culture influences how mental health is perceived and treated, yet the design of mental health technologies is limited with respect to how users’ backgrounds influence usability and adoption. To identify inclusive design opportunities, we interviewed 20 East Asian university students in Canada. We found that they struggle to engage with technologies for mental health due to cultural stigma which have led them to prefer apps that support self-help though still valuing social help. We present inclusive design opportunities for mental health technologies that sensitively consider these challenges, including supporting learning opportunities with peers through storytelling and skill-sharing to promote literacy, empowerment, and advocacy for their own health. We conclude by discussing how universities can promote mental wellbeing more inclusively.

Parents and their school-age children can impact one another's sleep. Most sleep-tracking tools, however, are designed for adults and make it difficult for parents and children to track together. To examine how to design a family-centered sleep tracking tool, we designed DreamCatcher. DreamCatcher is an in-home, interactive, shared display that aggregates data from wrist-worn sleep sensors and self-reported mood. We deployed DreamCatcher as a probe to examine the design space of tracking sleep as a family. Ten families participated in the study probe between 15 and 50 days. This study uses a family systems perspective to explore research questions regarding the feasibility of children actively tracking health data alongside their parents and the effects of tracking and sharing on family dynamics. Our results indicate that children can be active tracking contributors and that having parents and children track together encourages turn-taking and working together. However, there were also moments when family members, in particular parents, felt discomfort from sharing their sleep and mood with other family members. Our research contributes to a growing understanding of designing family-centered health-informatics tools to support the combined needs of parents and children.

Although Collaborative Information-Seeking (CIS) is becoming prevalent as people engage in shared decision-making, interface components adopted in the most commonly used information seeking tools (e.g., search, filter, select, and sort) are designed for individual use. To deepen our understanding of (1) how such single-user designs affect people's consensus building processes in CIS and (2) how to devise an alternative design to improve current practices, we conducted two 4-week diary studies and observed how groups seek out places together. Our studies focus on social event coordination as a case where CIS is necessary and important. In Study 1, we examined the major challenges people encounter when performing CIS using their preferred tools. These challenges include difficulties in capturing mutual preferences, high communication cost, and disparity of work depending on a group member's perceived role as an organizer or invitee. We discovered that improving a group's shared understanding of the target information they seek (e.g., places, products) could potentially address the challenges. In Study 2, we designed, deployed, and evaluated ComeTogether, a novel system that supports a group's social event coordination. ComeTogether adopts Collaborative Dynamic Queries (C-DQ), an interface designed to allow a group to share their preferences regarding potential destinations. Study 2 results indicate that using C-DQ increased users' awareness of other group members' preferences in performing CIS, making their coordination more transparent, more inviting, and fairer than what their current practice allows. Meanwhile, ComeTogether improved communication efficiency of groups while presenting opportunities to learn about others and to discover new places. We provide implications for design that explain considerations for adopting C-DQ and identify future research directions.

Sleep is an important aspect of our health, but it is difficult for people to track manually because it is an unconscious activity. The ability to sense sleep has aimed to lower the barriers of tracking sleep. Although sleep sensors are widely available, their usefulness and potential to promote healthy sleep behaviors has not been fully realized. To understand people's perspectives on sleep sensing devices and their potential for promoting sleep health, we surveyed 87 and interviewed 12 people who currently use or have previously used sleep sensors, interviewed 5 sleep medical experts, and conducted an in-depth qualitative analysis of 6986 reviews of the most popular commercial sleep sensing technologies. We found that the feedback provided by current sleep sensing technologies affects users' perceptions of their sleep and encourages goals that are in tension with evidence-based methods for promoting good sleep health. Our research provides design recommendations for improving the feedback of sleep sensing technologies by bridging the gap between expert and user goals.

In families composed of parents and children, the health of parents and children is often interrelated: the health of children can have an impact on the health of parents, and vice versa. However, the design of health tracking technologies typically focuses on individual self-tracking and self-management, not yet addressing family health in a unified way. To examine opportunities for family-centered health informatics, we interviewed 14 typically healthy families, interviewed 10 families with a child with a chronic condition, and conducted three participatory design sessions with children aged 7 to 11. Although we identified similarities between family-centered tracking and personal self-tracking, we also found families want to: (1) identify ripple effects between family members; (2) consider both caregivers and children as trackers to support distributing the burdens of tracking across family members; and (3) identify and pursue health guidelines that consider the state of their family (e.g., specific health guidelines for families that include a child with a chronic condition). We contribute to expanding the design lens from self-tracking to family-centered health tracking.