Collaboration and community building are crucial for equitable participation in research, especially in disability and accessibility research fields.Engaging with communities of disabled individuals helps understand their unique challenges, expectations, and needs, which should be reflected in assistive technology design.However, a gap exists between research in resource-rich societies and the practices of low-resource settings, where socio-economic and infrastructural constraints are often overlooked.Conversely, the innovation and sustainable solutions in these settings are often

Design empathy is a core HCI concept for understanding user perspectives in design processes. Although researchers advocate for leveraging design empathy in the design of assistive technology, educating novice designers about this is challenging; this is especially true in HCI classrooms when the target population includes people with disabilities, and students who do not have a disability are less aware of the diversity of disability. To help students better understand disability experiences, HCI education often adopts “be-like” (mimicking disabled-experience) approaches. However, accessibility researchers advocate adopting the “be-with” approach—learning about other’s experiences through companionship. To mitigate the logistical challenges of being-with in a classroom setting, we developed a “be-connected” approach, which facilitates learning about the disability experience through the narratives of real individuals. Using social media posts from a spinal cord injury subreddit, we developed and deployed an activity aiming to develop design empathy. Our qualitative evaluation showed a notable transformation in students’ design thinking process, suggesting an opportunity to leverage social media data to learn about disabled perspectives and develop design empathy.

Individuals who have sustained a Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) undergo abrupt changes in their functional abilities, impacting all aspects of their lives and imposing a life-long reliance on assistive tools and support from others. This paper aims to understand individuals’ support-seeking behavior in social media as they adjust to their “new normal”—life with reduced mobility and sensation. To understand their online support-seeking behavior, we conducted content analysis on 960 post-threads from SCI-specific subreddit groups. We found that individuals seek informational and emotional support regardless of injury level and time elapsed since injury. Additionally, individuals seek and receive online informational support concerning assistive logistics, motor-functionality, newly acquired self-care, and daily living activities. Similarly, individuals seek emotional support for motivation, and creating new self-identity. Finally, we discuss how social media support dynamics might facilitate reconstructing self-identity, adopting assistive technology, and improving relationships to help adjust to the “new normal.”

User research for scientific software can inform design and account for the unique concerns of academic researchers. In this study, we explored the user experience on a testbed for cloud computing research, CloudLab. Through 15 semi-structured interviews and observation, we observed the importance of time as a resource to system users. We observed CloudLab users strategically coordinating their time on the platform with other users, navigating the constraints of publication and other academic deadlines. Surprisingly, we found that this coordination may involve altruistic behaviors where users share time on CloudLab that had been allocated for personal use. In light of prior CSCW literature on how actors seek to harness time, we propose concrete opportunities for design interventions. Our strategy across all possible interventions is to increase users' awareness of the rhythms affecting their peers' platform use, allowing coordination based not just on knowledge of CloudLab reservations but also users' progress toward deadlines. The implications of this work inform the design of other similar cyberinfrastructure systems in science where users independently coordinate use of resources.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced researchers to find new ways to continue research, as universities and laboratories experienced closure due to nationwide lockdowns in many countries worldwide, including conducting experiments, workshops, and ethnographic work online. While this had a significant impact on the majority of research work across SIGCHI, research relating to disability and ageing was most impacted due to the additional challenges of recruiting participants, finding accessible online platforms, and ensuring seamless participation while juggling platform accessibility issues, facilitation, and supporting participants’ needs. These challenges were more extreme for disabled researchers. In this workshop, we aim to bring together researchers, designers, and practitioners to explore effective strategies and brainstorm actionable guidelines for supporting disability inclusive online research methods and platforms.

Individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) need to perform numerous self-care behaviors, some very frequently. Pressure reliefs (PRs), which prevent life-threatening pressure ulcers (PUs), are one such behavior. We conducted a qualitative study with seven individuals with severe SCI—who depend on power wheelchairs—to explore their current PR behavior and the potential for technology to facilitate PR adherence. While our participants were highly motivated to perform PRs because of prior PUs, we found that their understanding of how and when to perform a PR differed by individual, and that while they sometimes forgot to perform PR, in other cases contextual factors made it difficult to perform a PR. Our findings provide insight into the complexity of this design space, identify design considerations for designing technology to facilitate these behaviors, and demonstrate the opportunity for personal informatics to be more inclusive by supporting the needs of this population.

This work presents a series of studies aiming to explore challenges and opportunities for women pursuing education or profession in the computing field. The work is based on the framework of Naila Kabeer considering access, agency and achievement as elements of women's empowerment. The study methods adopted included exploratory and qualitative analysis, whereas the data collection process incorporated two in-person surveys (N=120, F=85); ten one-to-one interviews (N=10, F=10); eight focus group discussions (N=46, F=34), four seminars covering more than 200 female members (N=239, F=239) and finally, two observations on more than one thousand participants of programming engagements (N=1402, F=1402); considering students, educators and other stakeholders as participants. Our research work exhibits dedicated efforts to ensure opportunities based on Naila Kabeer's framework for women in computing from Bangladesh.

Maintaining independence and dignity is a primary goal of successful aging for older adults around the globe. Robots can support this goal in various ways by assisting everyday tasks that become challenging due to aging-related deterioration in physical and mental abilities. While a growing body of research tackles challenges in creating such robots, most work has focused on older adults with high socio-economic status in the developed world. In most cases, the price of these robots alone prohibits their potential use in the developing world. Further, socio-cultural differences in the developing world will limit the usability and chance of adoption of a robot designed based on users in the developed world. Our work aims to close this gap. In this paper we present findings from the user-centered design and development process of a low-cost assistive robot for older adults in the developing world named SHEBA, which is a Bengali term for care. We first interviewed 37 older adults and 21 caregivers in assisted and independent living settings in Dhaka, Bangladesh to gather requirements and understand priorities. We then developed a prototype focused on medication management and delivery and we brought it to an assisted living center to interact with potential older adult users. We interviewed 23 older adults and 5 caregivers who interacted with or observed our prototype to gather feedback. We present quantitative and qualitative data obtained in these interviews, identifying key requirements for robots designed for older adults in the developing world.

The contemporary Rohingya crisis has forced more than half a million Rohingya refugees to flee and take shelter in Bangladesh and the worst sufferers of the incident are the women, children, and old aged refugees undoubtedly. They have fled the compunction to protect themselves from going through a long tedious migration to Bangladesh, which also includes pregnant women who have a high risk of giving birth and health safety concerns. These crises get deepened when they have to collect food competing with men, look after their children in the camps, and getting proper sanitation. But until the crisis gets solved permanently, through a qualitative study on around 117 female refugees currently living in the Refugee Camp this paper aims to unfold the mental health condition of the female refugees escaping from Rakhine State. We have proposed a technology solution so that manpower and equipment lacking can be compensated. Our findings are mostly concentrated on designing the mental health solution for the traumatized women who had to encounter their beloved ones being oppressed. We have examined them through the lens of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research principle and stepped towards suggesting a technology intervention to enhance their current mental state

Diagnosis and characterization of Viruses, one of the most critical particle type among the water-borne organisms, have been going through continuous process of improvements and analyses. In this paper, a Mie scattering analysis has been presented for optical sorting of nanoscale sphere shaped Y1, T4 and C2 bacteriophage viruses suspended in Potassium Bi-Phosphate (PBS) solution. In this simulation work, Bohren and Huffman (BHMIE) model has been used and the incident light of 514 nm wavelength (resembling Argon ion laser) has been considered. Intensity components for different angles have been studied and it has been found that from 30° angle the components for the three viruses shift their comparative positions and give different characteristics. The extinction and scattering efficiencies remain same and around zero from size factor 0 to 0.6. But after size factor 0.6, the organism with smallest diameter shows the highest efficiency, whereas the other two viruses show identical efficiency result.