Adolescence is often associated with emotional upheaval and teens themselves value support with their emotions. HCI research on emotion regulation has focused on lab-based interventions for those with the greatest needs. This paper explores how adolescents use commercially available videogames in their daily environments and how these practices relate to emotion regulation. We conducted a 2-week diary and interview study with eleven teens asking them to reflect on their videogame practices and emotions. We deployed a multimodal diary to encourage authentic teen voice on factors not typically considered in intervention studies. Our findings indicate that teens use videogames to regulate their emotions and to recover from stress in diverse ways. These processes are often intertwined with adolescents’ social relationships and can be mediated through game affordances. We argue that traditional approaches to emotion regulation may be too individualistic to recognise or support the social dynamics that define teens’ emotional lives.

FFAME (Filtering Familiar Audio for Movement Exploration) is a novel sonification framework aiming to facilitate movement in individuals with chronic back pain. Our personalised, music-based approach contrasts and extends prior work with predetermined tonal sonification. FFAME progressively filters selected music based on angles of the trunk. Through a qualitative analysis of reported experience of 15 participants with chronic pain and 5 physiotherapists, we identify how sonification parameters and musical characteristics affect movement and meaning-making. Music-based movement sonification proved impactful across multiple dimensions: (1) encouraging movement, (2) escaping pain-related rumination, (3) externalizing pain experiences, and (4) scaffolding physical activities. Drawing on enactivism and related philosophies, the study highlights how the semantic indeterminacy of music, combined with real-time movement sonification, created a rich, open-ended environment that supported user agency and exploration. Sonification for pain management can be creative and expressive, enabling people with pain to extend challenging movements and build movement confidence.

Chronic pain is a prevalent condition where fear of movement and pain interfere with everyday functioning. Yet, there is no open body movement dataset for people with chronic pain in everyday settings. Our EmoPain@Home dataset addresses this with capture from 18 people with and without chronic pain in their homes, while they performed their routine activities. The data includes labels for pain, worry, and movement confidence continuously recorded for activity instances for the people with chronic pain. We explored baseline two-level pain detection based on this dataset and obtained 0.62 mean F1 score. However, extension of the dataset led to deterioration in performance confirming high variability in pain expressions for real world settings. We investigated baseline activity recognition for this setting as a first step in exploring the use of the activity label as contextual information for improving pain level classification performance. We obtained mean F1 score of 0.43 for 9 activity types, highlighting its feasibility. Further exploration, however, showed that data from healthy people cannot be easily leveraged for improving performance because worry and low confidence alter activity strategies for people with chronic pain. Our dataset and findings lay critical groundwork for automatic assessment of pain experience and behaviour in the wild.

Energy communities are a key focus for governments around the world in support of more sustainable energy practices. However, interactive systems for supporting energy communities to coordinate around renewable energy resources are still lacking. We present SolarClub, a demand-shifting visualization system that supported households in coordinating their energy usage by booking energy-hungry activities when solar energy was available. We deployed SolarClub with four groups of neighbors (N=15) for a month. SolarClub successfully enabled neighbors to coordinate, even when some of those participating households were less flexible. While participants reported that SolarClub did not foster a feeling of community, it helped them empathize with their neighbors. Our findings demonstrate the potential of sensor- and visualization-based technology to help understand the relation between everyday practices and resources consumption, beyond individual eco-feedback. This work thus contributes to the development of a next generation of practices and technologies that support collective action for environmental sustainability.

Personal informatics (PI) technologies allow users to collect data about aspects of their lifestyle like mood or step count. Though teens increasingly encounter and use such technologies, little is known about how they ascribe meaning to their own PI activities. We report a qualitative study of the PI experiences of eighteen teens (aged 14 – 17). Following a learning phase focused on interpreting PI data, participants chose a personal goal that interested them and a PI tool to track it for 4-8 weeks in everyday contexts. Participants proved to be competent, flexible users of PI tools, tracking a range of meaningful life factors, from ‘worries’ to ‘exercise’; they valued learning about ‘natural patterns’ in their lives and were motivated to manage their emotions and evaluate whether they were doing the right thing. Our findings contribute to understanding how young people can engage in appropriation and interpretation of PI data – suggesting opportunities for educational interventions and design.

While a growing number of technologies offer personal data to the user, little is known about how such tools can be harnessed for and by adolescents. Prior work has focused on implementations, in which youth experience is subordinated to the prescribed aims of adults. Few studies have engaged with the concerns and motives of the young people themselves. Co-design can be a powerful method for exploring beyond such limits, informing design that reflects the voices and values of the designed-for population. This paper presents a case study exploring the design of a personal informatics app (LifeMosaic) by a group of 14 to 16-year-olds. LifeMosaic lets users set any focus they personally care about and track it using colours and stickers. The design was shaped through youth concerns around privacy, social support, flexibility and self-expression as well as the desire to support mental wellbeing. This work illustrates new opportunities and understandings for personal informatics with youth: framing the data as mediating transindividual meaning making.