The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies into healthcare has shown great potential, particularly in remote health monitoring. This paper proposes a novel system combining gas colorimetry with cloud-based IoT schemes to enable precise, non-intrusive home health monitoring. Using highly specific gas sensing through advanced colorimetric gas sensors, this approach detects health-related pollutants and noxious gases in the ambient air, providing continuous real-time data to healthcare providers. The system includes a compact IoT-enabled device capable of simultaneously reading up to four distinct colorimetric gas sensors, complemented by environmental sensing capabilities. This new gasometric device, roughly the size of a credit card, offers a robust, scalable, and privacy-preserving solution for integrating real-time data into cloud-based health analytics. Furthermore, this device is designed to be deployed and integrated within commercial setups along with other advanced sensors, such as cardiorespiratory tracking radars, allowing for complementary analysis of physiology metrics. These features make it a cost-effective and adaptable tool for home diagnostics, bridging the gap between advanced sensing technologies and practical healthcare delivery.

Recent research on remote tracking environments has strengthened smart home IoT ecosystems by the integration of multiple sensing tools that capture not only contextual data in a private setting, but also information about its residents. This shift paves the way for remote health industries, as information traditionally out of reach is available 24/7. Gas sensing, moving away from privacy-invasive tracking paradigms, emerges within this context, inspiring the monitoring of activities of daily living (ADLs) that could facilitate the remote healthcare supervision of the elderly. In this paper, we present how a gas sensing array based on low-cost commercial metal oxide (MOX) gas sensors has been assembled for the development of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) model which detects cooking activity within a household. Our resulting unobtrusive tracking system requiring no user input and posing no privacy concerns, suitable to other ADL use cases, highlights how AI-equipped IoT cloud infrastructures and accurate gas sensors are called to revolutionise remote healthcare.

Deep Pressure Therapy relies on exerting firm touch to help individuals with sensory sensitivity. We performed first-person explorations of deep pressure enabled by shape-changing actuation driven by breathing sensing. This revealed a novel design space with rich, evocative, aesthetically interesting interactions that can help increase breathing awareness and appreciation through: (1) applying symmetrical as well as asymmetrical pressure on the torso; (2) using pressure to direct attention to muscles or bone structure involved in different breathing patterns; (3) apply synchronous as well as asynchronous feedback following or opposing the user’s breathing rhythm through applying rhythmic pressure. Taken together these explorations led us to design (4) breathing correspondence interactions – a balance point right between leading and following users’ breathing patterns by first applying deep pressure – almost to the point of being unpleasant – and then releasing in rhythmic flow.

In this paper, we reflect on the applicability of the concept of trajectories to soma design. Soma design is a first-person design method which considers users’ subjective somatic or bodily experiences of a design. Due to bodily changes over time, soma experiences are inherently temporal. Current instruments for articulating soma experiences lack the power to express the effects of experiences on the body over time. To address this, we turn to trajectories, a well-known concept in the HCI community, as a way of mapping this aspect of soma experience. By showing trajectories through a range of dimensions, we can articulate individual experiences and differences in those experiences. Through analysis of a set of soma experience designs and a set of temporal dimensions within the experiences, this paper demonstrates how trajectories can provide a practical conceptual framing for articulating the temporal complexity of soma designs.

We report on a somaesthetic design workshop and the subsequent analytical work aiming to demystify what is entailed in a non-dualistic design stance on embodied interaction and why a first-person engagement is crucial to its unfoldings. However, as we will uncover through a detailed account of our process, these first-person engagements are deeply entangled with second- and third-person perspectives, sometimes even overlapping. The analysis furthermore reveals some strategies for bridging the body-mind divide by attending to our inner universe and dissolving or traversing dichotomies between inside and outside ; individual and social ; body and technology . By detailing the creative process, we show how soma design becomes a process of designing with and through kinesthetic experience, in turn letting us confront several dualisms that run like fault lines through HCI’s engagement with embodied interaction.

Much research has shown the potential of affective interfaces for reflection on, and understanding of bodily responses. Yet, people find it difficult to engage with, and understand their biodata which they have limited prior experience with. Building on affective interfaces and material-centered design, we developed ThermoPixels, a toolkit including thermochromic and heating materials, as well as galvanic skin response sensors for creating representations of physiological arousal. Within 10 workshops, 20 users with no expertise in biosensors or thermochromic materials created personalized representations of physiological arousal and its real-time changes using the toolkit. We report on participants' material exploration, their experience of creating shapes and the use of colors for emotional awareness and regulation. We discuss embodied exploration and creative expression, the value of technology in emotion regulation and its social context, and the importance of understanding material limitations for affective sense-making.

Biosensing technologies are increasingly available as off-the-shelf products, yet for many designers, artists and non-engineers, these technologies remain difficult to design with. Through a soma design stance, we devised a novel approach for exploring qualities in biodata. Our explorative process culminated in the design of three artefacts, coupling biosignals to tangible actuation formats. By making biodata perceivable as sound, in tangible form or directly on the skin, it became possible to link qualities of the measurements to our own somatics - our felt experience of our bodily bioprocesses - as they dynamically unfold, spurring somatically-grounded design discoveries of novel possible interactions. We show that making biodata attainable for a felt experience - or as we frame it: turning biodata into somadata - enables not only first-person encounters, but also supports collaborative design processes as the somadata can be shared and experienced dynamically, right at the moment when we explore design ideas.

We report on a workshop bringing together researchers working in soma design and sensory misalignment. Creating experiences that make use of sensory misalignment has become increasingly common, often associated with virtual reality research. However, little attention has been paid to how to design such experiences. We argue that the practice of soma design is a relevant candidate method for designing misalignment experiences, since soma design brings with it concepts such as estrangement and disrupting the habitual as a path to design. We further argue that sensory misalignment may in turn extend soma design methods, adding methods for explicitly disrupting sensory perception using technology interventions. Finally, we draw on the findings of that workshop to discuss the ideas of: pluralism in experience; orchestration of overall experience; as well as the broader intersection of soma design and sensory misalignment approaches.