Children with chronic conditions face evolving challenges in daily activities, peer relationships, and clinical care. Younger children often rely on parental support, while older ones seek independence. Prior studies on chronic conditions explored proxy-based, family-centered, and playful approaches to support children’s health, but most technologies treat children as a homogeneous group rather than adapting to their developmental differences. To address this gap, we conducted four co-design workshops with 69 children with congenital heart disease (CHD) at a medically supported camp, spanning elementary, middle, and high school groups. Our analysis reveals distinct coping strategies: elementary children relied on comfort objects and reassurance, middle schoolers used mediated communication and selective disclosure, and high schoolers emphasized agency and direct engagement with peers and providers. Through child-centered participatory design, we contribute empirical insights into how children’s management of chronic conditions evolves and propose design implications for pediatric health technologies that adapt across developmental trajectories.

International students in emerging adulthood face unique challenges as they navigate life transitions and adapt to new environments. These challenges significantly affect their mental well-being. While previous HRI studies have explored robotic solutions to address anxiety through therapeutic guidance, positive psychology, and mood recognition, little is known about design features tailored to the challenges of transition. By deploying co-design probes with 18 international students experiencing mild symptoms of anxiety and depression, we investigate their lived experiences and coping strategies and translate these insights into design implications for social robots. Our findings indicate that participants envisioned robots that create a welcoming living environment through seamless design and provide a sense of agency through achievable tasks. These features were seen as particularly helpful in relieving day-to-day tension in effortless ways. Based on these findings, we discuss how social robots can better support transitions in emerging adulthood.

Farming plays a significant role in the economy by supporting related industries such as food, retail, and local services. Community-based small farms, while offering unique social and cultural benefits, face persistent challenges, including limited access to formal education and underdeveloped infrastructure, which have been discussed in prior research. This study focuses on community-driven factors, such as workarounds for recording critical information and practices for passing down farming knowledge across generations. Through 11 semi-structured interviews with farmers from a small ethnic community, the Hmong, we explore how bonding social capital, rooted in close family and community ties, supports informal knowledge exchange and creates pathways to bridging and linking capital. These relationships help farmers connect to broader networks, resources, and institutions. Our findings highlight opportunities for designing technologies that support and strengthen existing support systems. We discuss how technologies should be designed to reflect the cultural values, unique practices, and intergenerational relationships embedded in community-based farms.

Patient-provider communication is an important aspect of successful healthcare, as it can directly lead to positive health outcomes.Previous studies examined factors that facilitate communication between healthcare providers and patients in socially marginalized communities, especially developing countries, and applied identified factors to technology development.However, there is limited understanding of how providers work with patients from immigrant populations in a developed country.By conducting semistructured interviews with 15 providers working with patients from an immigrant community with unique cultural characteristics, we identified providers' effective communication strategies, including acknowledgment, community involvement, gradual care, and adaptive communication practices (i.e., adjusting the communication style).Based on our findings, we highlight cultural competence and discuss design implications for technologies to support health communication in immigrant communities.Our suggestions propose approaches for HCI researchers to identify practical, contextualized cultural competence for their health technology design.

Individuals resettled in a new environment often face challenges in accessing adequate healthcare services, particularly within the complex processes of outpatient clinic care. Cultural differences, language barriers, and low socioeconomic status contribute to these difficulties. While previous studies have identified barriers and proposed technology-mediated solutions for resettled populations, many focus on addressing deficits rather than building on the strengths these communities already possess, which limits the sustainability and relevance of these solutions in everyday life. We conducted two community-based participatory design workshops with 30 Hmong community members in a large metropolitan area in the US. Through this process, we identified four types of assets the community has gradually developed, including intergenerational support for health management and storytelling-based communication practices that facilitate relatable and culturally grounded interactions. We show how participatory design workshops can foster asset-based approaches, and discuss design implications for technologies that leverage patients' existing strengths to support their health management during outpatient visits.

Sleep has been studied as an individual activity, with the interconnected behaviors among family members being rarely considered. In this study, by incorporating the identified themes from the previous phase, we designed and tested two types of family-based sleep management systems: Bedtime Pal and Caring Heart. These systems redistributed sleep-relevant tasks among family members, so that they would have the chance to reflect on the difficulties and values involved in those tasks. We deployed the two prototypes and performed an in-the-wild study with 12 families in their homes. This study empirically revealed the importance of considering social dynamics as a design factor for family sleep management technologies. Design implications for sleep management technologies are discussed.

Sleep is a vital health issue. Continued sleep deficiency can increase the chance of stroke, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and diabetes. Previous studies have investigated sleep as an individual activity performed within bedrooms at night. In this study with twenty parents of young children, we identify sleep as a complex experience entangled with social dynamics between family members. For example, children's sleep means not just time for children to rest, but time for self-care for parents. This paper's contributions are twofold. First, we show how the boundaries that define sleep in terms of time (at night), space (in bedrooms), and unit of analysis (individual-focused) limit designers' opportunities to tackle the deeper sleep issues of families. Second, we suggest "division of labor" as an important but rarely discussed design concept to enhance family sleep, and as a design theme for home technologies that address issues emerging from social dynamics between householders.

As more than half of the U.S. population is identified as a video gamer, a growing number of studies have investigated the health issues of gamers who spend prolonged times playing games. Potential health issues of gamers include eye fatigue, neck/back pain, wrist pain, mental stress and other issues. To alleviate potential health issues of gamers, this paper investigates how robots can help gamers better manage their health issues. We conducted three studies with gamers, including an informal interview, an online survey, and a co-design session. In the three studies with gamers, we found that gamers focused on the robot design factors-how robots get the gamers ’ attention, and how they force gamers to pause their play, while still seeming friendly. Our preliminary results indicate substantial promise regarding the role of robots in gamers ’ health management, which we will investigate in our future research.

Minjin Rheua*, Ji Youn Shina, Wei Penga & Jina Huh-Yooba Media and Information, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USAb Department of Information Science, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USAMinjin Rheu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University. Her research delves into how specific designs or features of communication technology influences users’ motivational and cognitive processes through which people change or adopt their health and prosocial behaviors.Ji Youn Shin is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University. Her research includes human-computer interaction, human-centered design, and health communication. She designs and evaluates technologies for supporting individuals’ health and wellness in various health contexts, including family caregiving and pediatric chronic illnesses.Wei Peng is a Professor in the Department of Media and Information, Michigan State University. Her research focuses on the psychological and social mechanisms of behavior change and their application in the design of interactive media for health and wellness promotion.Jina Huh-Yoo is an Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Drexel University's College of Computing & Informatics. Her research areas include human-computer interaction, health informatics, and research ethics of health informatics technologies. She was a PI of NIH and NSF-funded projects in promoting health and wellness through consumer-facing technologies.CONTACT Minjin Rheu [email protected] Media and Information, Michigan State University, 404 Wilson Rd, Room 414, East Lansing, MI 48823, USAABSTRACTOff-the-shelf conversational agents are permeating people’s everyday lives. In these artificial intelligence devices, trust plays a key role in users’ initial adoption and successful utilization. Factors enhancing trust toward conversational agents include appearances, voice features, and communication styles. Synthesizing such work will be useful in designing evidence-based, trustworthy conversational agents appropriate for various contexts. We conducted a systematic review of the experimental studies that investigated the effect of conversational agents’ and users’ characteristics on trust. From a full-text review of 29 articles, we identified five agent design-themes affecting trust toward conversational agents: social intelligence of the agent, voice characteristics and communication style, look of the agent, non-verbal communication, and performance quality. We also found that participants’ demographic, personality, or use context moderate the effect of these themes. We discuss implications for designing trustworthy conversational agents and responsibilities around on stereotypes and social norm building through agent design.

Family caregivers of patients with chronic conditions often subject themselves to drastic life changes. The quality of life of the caregivers often decreases noticeably at the beginning of the caregiving trajectory, because they typically reorient their lives to focus on the patient's health status. As a result, previous studies viewed caregivers primarily as people who need help and focused on how technologies can support them. However, in our study, we found that caregivers are also capable of developing their own experiential knowledge and strategies, which have been invisible in previous caregiver studies. By conducting in-home interviews with fourteen family caregivers, we present the types of new knowledge and coping strategies family caregivers have developed from their lived experiences during everyday caregiving tasks. These include 1) establishing new mindsets, 2) developing mindful activities, 3) building relationship management strategies, and 4) sharing experiences with people in their own networks. Based on our findings, we call for an asset-based approach that will help researchers notice the capabilities of caregivers. This approach could enable researchers to be more reflexive in the incorporation of caregivers' devalued knowledge within their system designs.

Diverse fields, including CSCW, Communication, and Human Development studies, have investigated how technologies can better support parent-child relationships. While these studies are scattered across literature, little effort has been made to synthesize the findings. We conducted a review of studies that examined the factors associated with parent-child relationships that are mediated by technologies. Specifically, we synthesized previous studies based on children's age groups and different family contexts, including cohabitation. From a total of 12,942 search results from two databases, and 32 results from the hand-searching process, we conducted a full-text review of 190 articles and identified 19 suitable studies. An additional search during the revision cycle resulted in 6 more full-text reviews and 1 additional study being included in the data analysis. We analyzed challenges and facilitators in designing CSCW systems supporting parent-child relationships for families living together or apart and families with children of different developmental stages. Findings showed two common challenges, which should be addressed in technology designed to support parent-child relationships: discrepancies in expected communication between parents and child(ren) and the complex emotions of parents toward parenting caused by their busy schedules. Challenges specific to families who are living apart included consequences from being physically distant and having limited access to communication resources. The following factors commonly helped facilitate parent-child relationships: (1) reciprocity norms of the family (2) reinforcement of transparency, affection, and trust, (3) a physical proxy of each other through an object or interface design, (4) accessibility, the sophistication level of technology, and communication resources, (5) enjoyable, age-appropriate shared content among parents and children, and (6) situational awareness and routine as ways to increase parent-child relationships. Media richness and synchronicity in system design and privacy preservation without interruption facilitated parent-child relationships of families living apart. Based on the findings, we discuss opportunities for technological innovation for physically co-located families and the importance of considering children's age and developmental stages in designing technology for parent-child relationships.

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is one of the most common chronic diseases for children in the United States. Once diagnosed, the family must manage the disease to prevent further complications. Recent health technologies, like mobile phone health applications (mHealth apps), have become useful tools to support health monitoring, particularly for children living in the digital era. We used a narrative story to prompt 10 children with T1D to describe their diabetes management routines during semi-structured video interviews. Our results show that while the children feel a sense of ownership over their management routine, especially if they use newer monitoring technologies (e.g., continuous glucose monitor), they experience many challenges in managing their blood glucose (BG) levels, particularly during school. They also expressed emerging fears of security and privacy issues associated with technology use. By capturing these themes in T1D management from the children's perspective, we discuss design implications for developing supportive mHealth interventions.

Children with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) are required to manage their illness to alleviate further long-term complications. Although children are expected to engage in appropriate self-management activities once they become older, many of the children remain passive actors in managing their condition. Due to the lack of knowledge and skills, as well as changes in parent-child relationships, children demonstrate low self-care adherence. Consequently, parents also face difficulties in defining their role in long-term care. This study, part of a larger study, comprised of three phases: mobile app development, prototype feasibility testing, and usability testing with child-parent dyads users. As part of the third phase, this study used qualitative interviews with 24 child-parent dyads to understand the existing facilitators and barriers in using the app. Our findings suggest that users found that the app reminded them to track their blood glucose (BG) values and facilitated child-parent communication in a user-friendly manner. By capturing the emerging themes in adopting the app from the children's perspective, we will iteratively refine the app to better suit the users' requirements.

Blood and marrow transplantation (BMT) is an intensive therapy for patients with life-threatening hematologic cancer as well as non-cancer diagnoses. Children, adolescents and young adults undergoing BMT ("pediatric patients") experience intensive medical procedures during their treatment and post-treatment recovery phases. We conducted a field study to identify common barriers that interfere with pediatric patient engagement in the management of their health and challenges that caregivers confront. Our study revealed four main factors. By exploring emerging themes, we suggest design opportunities for health technology to support patients and their caregivers over the course of long-term outpatient management.