Abstract Abstract: People experience transitional events during their lives that are significant, disruptive, and potentially challenging to navigate. Emotions usually run high, and the central actor may seek personalized support from “others” who are often identified online. An increased online presence, however, can also exacerbate vulnerabilities, making it challenging for individuals to preserve their privacy. Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) can support people undergoing transitions to have more control over their online identity and related disclosures. Nevertheless, available tools of this kind do not explicitly cater to the needs of such populations, leading to low uptake. To inform the future development of bespoke PETs, we carried out a survey to understand the population characteristics and online behaviors of four transition groups: (1) leaving the Armed Forces; (2) Relationship Breakdown (Romantic); (3) Serious Illness (Cancer); and (4) LGBTQ+ (“coming out” or gender transition). Our findings suggest that bespoke PETs should engender resilience and a sense of control over what is shared online via the identification, creation, and maintenance of “safe spaces” in which network members are restricted to trusted others who are deemed supportive of the actor’s transition.

Significant life transitions are difficult and stressful periods, where personal identity and relationships undergo change. Accessing information and social support during these times requires disclosure: we must reveal information about ourselves to gain useful information. Yet, managing disclosure of information online during these periods presents great challenges and burdens to the central actor. We therefore sought to identify the information disclosure practices of people undergoing diverse selected life transitions (leaving the Armed Forces; relationship breakdown; coming out as LGBTQ+; living with cancer) with respect to online privacy and its implications for the design of information access systems. We achieved this via a scoping review, searching across nine databases to identify relevant articles, before carrying out an inductive thematic analysis of the charted data. We surface a key common disclosure strategy of multiple temporal selves, whereby people undergoing life transitions present multiple situated identities reflecting both their past and emerging identities, bound to desired levels of disclosure within specific online spaces/networks. This strategy is transacted via nuanced use of privacy features online, which calls for a high level of digital literacy. Our resulting design recommendations offer opportunities for information systems to support people in: safely partitioning their identity across new, and within existing, online spaces; creating spaces for personal reflection; and having a more informed awareness of the depth of information shared. The need for deeper understanding of the privacy requirements of two under-studied groups - leaving the Armed Forces, and living with cancer – is also highlighted.

People with intellectual disabilities often experience inequalities that affect the standard of their everyday lives. Assistive technologies can help alleviate some of these inequalities, yet abandonment rates remain high. This is in part due to a lack of involvement of all stakeholders in their design and evaluation, thus resulting in outputs that do not meet this cohort’s complex and heterogeneous needs. The aim of this half-day workshop is to focus on community building in a field that is relatively thin and disjointed, thereby enabling researchers to share experiences on how to design for and with people with intellectual disabilities, provide internal support, and establish new collaborations. Workshop outcomes will help to fill a gap in the available guidelines on how to include people with intellectual disabilities in research, through more accessible protocols as well as personalised and better fit-for-purpose technologies.

Co-design techniques generally rely upon higher-order cognitive skills, such as abstraction and creativity, meaning they may be inaccessible to people with intellectual disabilities (ID). Consequently, investigators must adjust the methods employed throughout their studies to ensure the complex needs of people with ID are appropriately catered to. Yet, there are a lack of guidelines to support researchers in this process, with previous literature often neglecting to discuss the decisions made during the development of their study protocols. We propose a new procedure to overcome this lack of support, by utilizing the knowledge of “experts” in ID to design a more accessible workshop for the target population. 12 experts across two focus groups were successful in identifying accessibility barriers throughout a set of typical early co-design activities. Recommendations to overcome these barriers are discussed along with lessons on how to better support people with ID to engage in co-design.

Patients with mild intellectual disabilities (ID) face significant communication barriers within primary care services. This has a detrimental effect on the quality of treatment being provided, meaning the consultation process could benefit from augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technologies. However, little research has been conducted in this area beyond that of paper-based aids. We address this by extracting design requirements for a clinical AAC tablet application from n=10 adults with mild ID. Our results show that such technologies can promote communication between general practitioners (GPs) and patients with mild ID by extracting symptoms in advance of the consultation via an accessible questionnaire. These symptoms act as a referent and assist in raising the awareness of conditions commonly overlooked by GPs. Furthermore, the application can support people with ID in identifying and accessing healthcare services. Finally, the participants identified 6 key factors that affect the clarity of medical images.

Previous studies have suggested that the learning disability (LD) population face significant communication barriers when interacting with health professionals. Such obstacles may be considered as preventable; however, there is a surprising lack of research-based technologies available that intend to promote this communication. We aim to address this issue by investigating the potential use of mobile technologies to support adults with mild LDs during clinical consultations. To achieve this, we interviewed 10 domain experts including government advisors, academics, support workers and General Practitioners. The extracted information was used to develop an initial technology probe, which was evaluated by a subset of the aforementioned experts. The overall contribution of this research is a set of design guidelines for the development of Augmentative and Communicative technologies that target the clinical needs of adults with mild LDs.