Group mood and engagement are invisible currents that shape how people collaborate at work, emerging through everyday interactions rather than isolated individual states. While positive socio-emotional dynamics support collaboration and productivity, they remain difficult to sense and interpret unobtrusively. This work investigates whether posture-based behavioral cues sensed through everyday objects can provide insight into group mood and engagement. We present a pressure-sensing chair prototype that captures changes in weight distribution during meetings. In a study with 14 groups (N = 46), we combine postural cues with participants’ retrospective video annotation to triangulate engagement and mood. Our results show that posture activity is associated with engagement and mood arousal, while moments of shared group mood co-occur with increased postural synchrony. We further identify synchronized behavioral patterns reflecting affective convergence and contagion. These findings demonstrate how situated sensing through everyday objects can reveal socio-emotional dynamics and inform the design of collaborative systems.

Children’s self-report is essential for research, education, and healthcare, yet existing methods such as surveys and diaries can be experienced as tedious and so lead to disengagement and low-quality responses. Chatbots have been suggested as a way to support children through conversational interaction, using age-appropriate language and an empathetic tone. Here we explore what could be suitable conversational styles for such chatbots. Specifically, we explore rhyme as a child-centered conversational style. We first conducted a co-design workshop with 35 children, which revealed preferences for short, playful, and soothing conversational patterns. Building on these insights, we designed a voice-based sleep diary in rhyming style and compared it to a prose style in a within-subjects study involving 40 children aged 8-12. Results show that rhyming prompts significantly improved response quality across question types and age groups, while maintaining high engagement even among children who preferred the prose style. We contribute proof-of-concept empirical evidence and design insights demonstrating how phonological scaffolding exemplified through rhyme extends the design space of capability-adapted chatbots beyond semantic simplification alone. While limited to short-term, lab-based sessions, this work provides initial evidence that conversational style can function as a design lever.

Digital sleep diaries are widely used in clinical practice and research to monitor children’s subjective sleep quality. A well-known limitation of survey methods is that children may not provide high-quality responses because they cannot or are not motivated to do so. We examine how to design "live", continuous feedback in voice-based sleep diaries in order to enhance the quality of children’s responses. In a co-design workshop, we explored children’s preferences for different forms of feedback. We designed and compared experimentally symbolic (smiley), numeric, and no-feedback conditions, showing that both feedback types improved response quality across questions. Finally, an eight-day field study revealed that feedback resulted in higher and more consistent quality in self-report over time. Across these three studies, children valued playful and clear feedback, with preferences shifting depending on their cognitive needs. Our findings provide evidence that effective feedback must balance affective engagement and cognitive clarity and adapt to different contexts. We contribute empirically supported design insights for creating child-centered voice-based surveys that aim to enhance children’s adherence in independent self-report surveys. Our recommendations based on the study of sleep diaries can potentially be applied in other areas using voice-based surveys.

Sleep diaries are essential self-reporting tools for understanding children’s sleep patterns, but maintaining sustained engagement and high-quality self-reporting remains challenging. While voice input has been explored in child-computer interaction research as a method to improve engagement, limited evidence exists regarding its effectiveness in supporting sustained self-reporting over time. To address this gap, we conducted a five-day field study with 20 children aged seven to twelve, using a multimodal sleep diary that integrated both voice and text input modalities. Our findings reveal that voice input significantly supports younger children in maintaining engagement over five days, though their response quality remains lower than that of older children. Two distinct response quality patterns over time also emphasize the importance of accounting for individual differences in task performance. Furthermore, input modality preferences varied by age: older children consistently favored text input, while younger children generally preferred voice input over time. These results highlight the potential of incorporating voice input into text-based sleep diaries to better accommodate the diverse needs of children, enhancing both sustained engagement and response quality. Future studies with longer observation periods are needed to validate and extend these findings.

Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) has shown promise in supporting emotion regulation for neurodivergent children. Recently, there has been increasing interest in leveraging advanced technologies to assist parents in co-regulating emotions with their children. However, limited research has explored the integration of large language models (LLMs) with SAR to facilitate emotion co-regulation between parents and children with neurodevelopmental disorders. To address this gap, we developed an LLM-powered social robot by deploying a speech communication module on the MiRo-E robotic platform. This supervised autonomous system integrates LLM prompts and robotic behaviors to deliver tailored interventions for both parents and neurodivergent children. Pilot tests were conducted with two parent-child dyads, followed by a qualitative analysis. The findings reveal MiRo-E’s positive impacts on interaction dynamics and its potential to facilitate emotion regulation, along with identified design and technical challenges. Based on these insights, we provide design implications to advance the future development of LLM-powered SAR for mental health applications.

Users of online health communities have difficulty finding others with similar health experiences. They are often asked to use keywords when searching for their peers, but it is not uncommon for them not to know the right terms. This becomes particularly complex when unsure what or whom they are looking for. Moreover, the richness of patient perspectives is lost in the volume of discussion threads. In this paper, we investigate how to design to facilitate locating peers and learning self-care ideas from them. We created a prototype mimicking a mobile application for an online health community. The application recommended other community members to connect with and suggested self-care ideas based on what they had tried. Following a user-centered qualitative evaluation, we explore what ten people with cardiovascular disease and three clinicians thought of the prototype. Our findings reveal the preponderance of the lifestyle profile in locating peers. In light of this, we argue that, as individuals seek to lead as normal a life as possible, the most helpful suggestions in their quest may come from peers most similar to them in terms of habits and activity level. We translate the research findings into recommendations to inform future design. • Our findings reveal the preponderance of the lifestyle profile in locating peers. • Seeking normalcy, individuals may favor suggestions from peers with similar lifestyles. • Peer recommendations, enabling user control and potentially reducing search efforts, were favored. • Design should attend to the everyday self-care strategies community members can contribute.

Publicly displaying personal tracking data can promote healthier lifestyles, with most existing research focusing on digital visualizations. However, public physicalizations have been shown to attract more attention and foster greater engagement. Despite this, few studies in this area have utilized personal physical activity data as input or explored its impact on motivating data generators’ physical activity. To address this gap, we designed PlanetWalker, a system that visualizes users’ walking steps on their phone and shows the visualization publicly through a digital display, as well as medium- and large-scale public physicalizations as probes. The probes were deployed following the Wizard of Oz method in sequence during a six-week in-the-wild study. Through evaluations with users generating data and passersby, our findings show how public physicalizations can improve motivation, facilitate social interaction, and increase engagement. We conclude by discussing the design directions for supporting the public presentation of personal data through public physicalization to motivate physical activity and provide design trade-offs and suggestions on the physicality and scale of the medium.

Parent involvement in children’s homework has emerged as an important component of their education. However, this involvement can generate tension between parents and children, particularly when coupled with a heavy workload, potentially exacerbating stress levels in children. Some children desire to express and share their stress with their parents. However, limited emotional regulation abilities and a lack of stress awareness often hinder effective stress management and communication by children. To address this, we designed a stress biofeedback system named Stress Diffuser, comprising a wearable biosensor with interactive embodied devices, that display the child’s stress during homework sessions. The system intends to manage children’s stress by enhancing awareness among both the child and the parent, and influencing their educational strategies and the way of interaction. We conducted experiments with eight families, including primary school children aged eight to eleven and their parents. The results of our quantitative and qualitative analysis indicated that all participants enhanced their stress awareness while using Stress Diffuser during homework. Most parents adjusted their supervisory strategies and interaction styles in response to their children’s stress data. The study sheds light on children’s needs for a designed agent to communicate their stress and regulate their emotions. Furthermore, the study explores the use of interactive biofeedback technology in homework settings with parent involvement. It reveals a favorable influence on facilitating stress management in children and on enhancing the quality of supervision and interaction between children and parents.

During the design, it is important to evaluate the user experience of representative users in many human product interactions. But, in some cases, it is difficult or even impossible to recruit representative users because they have disabilities that do not allow them to take part in such investigations. Thus, alternative populations are widely studied. The most common way to replace real blind people is to use sighted but blindfolded users when studying design solutions. To test whether such alternative or proxy users can be used to represent blind people in social interactions, we examined the communication quality of 20 blind-sighted pairs and 20 blindfolded-sighted pairs in two different experiments. A prototype named E-Gaze glasses was evaluated as the testing tool. Results clearly show that the blindfolded participants achieved significantly higher communication quality than the blind participants. In qualitative data analysis, the blindfolded participants also reported their user experience of being blindfolded in conversations. Our qualitative results strengthen the conclusion that blindfolded users’ behaviour is different from real blind users’ behaviour. We recommend that blind users should not be substituted for blindfolded users in human product evaluations when communication quality is measured.

Researcher has been trying to optimize the method for evaluating presence in virtual reality (VR) to address variability and uncertainty in quick evaluations using questionnaires. We recommend using the Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) model to calculated the iGroup Presence Questionnaire to measure users’ overall presence in VR prototyping, instead of the weighted sum approach. The effects of two presence factors (scene density and motion trajectory technology) on a self-developed VR swimming virtual system were tested using the TOPSIS model with 20 participants each 12 tasks in a user experiment. The results were compared using two different weighting methods, fuzzy hierarchical analysis and uniform weighting methods. TOPSIS had a narrower range of data within the 95% confidence interval and a significantly lower coefficient of variation (CV). This indicates enhanced precision in evaluating presence and can be used to compare different technique setting of virtual systems.

As the population ages rapidly, there is a strong focus on the healthy aging of older adults. A central part of healthy aging is keeping people connected in later social life. Exergames are recommended as one of the coping strategies to help improve health and quality of life in older adults. In our study, we developed an exergame called Social Balance Ball to engage older and younger people to play together, encouraging social interaction between generations. From May to July 2021, we evaluated this exergame in Shanghai, China, performing a user experiment with 18 unfamiliar young-old pairs under three test conditions (virtual player, mediated human player, and co-located human player). To evaluate the exergame, our main findings demonstrated that participants felt significantly perceived social interaction in mediated play and co-located play than in virtual play. Overall, older participants perceived significantly higher social interaction than younger participants. In this study, we contribute (1) empirical research findings on how the Social Balance Ball exergame enhances social interaction in generations; (2) design implications for informing future design and development of social exergames.

Mediated social touch (MST) is a popular way to communicate emotion and connect people in mobile communication. This article applies MST gestures with vibrotactile stimuli in two online communication modes—asynchronous and synchronous communication (texting and video calling) to enhance social presence for mobile communication. We first designed the application that included the visual design of MST gestures, the vibrotactile stimuli design for MST gestures, and the interface design for texting and video calling. Then, we conducted a user study to explore if the MST gestures with vibrotactile stimuli could increase social presence in texting and video calling compared to MST gestures without vibrotactile stimuli. We also explored if the communication modes affected the social presence significantly when applying MST signals. The quantitative data analysis shows that adding vibrotactile stimuli to MST gestures helps to increase social presence in the aspects of co-presence, perceived behavior interdependence, perceived affective understanding, and perceived emotional interdependence. Adding vibrotactile stimuli to MST gestures causes no significant differences in attentional allocation and perceived message understanding. There is no significant difference between texting and video calling when applying MST signals in mobile communication. The qualitative data analysis shows that participants think MST gestures with vibrotactile stimuli are interesting, and they are willing to use them in mobile communication, but the application design should be iterated based on their feedback.

In both remote and physical work environments, it is commonplace for help-seeking messages to be rejected by other colleagues. This paper investigates how signifying co-workers’ stress status would influence the social diction and empathy of help-seekers in the context of rejection. 36 participants were recruited to perform help-seeking tasks with virtual co-workers via a professional mobile messaging application (Trillian). Their device was tailored with a vibrotactile mechanism (TacStatus), which could signify different emotional states of the co-workers: no-cue, relaxed, normal, and stressful. Independent sample Friedman nonparametric tests were conducted to analyze the social diction and empathy of the participants in their messages for help-seeking and responses to the co-workers’ rejection. This study revealed that stress cues have observable impacts on the social diction and empathy of help-seekers. Stressful and relaxed cues were found to evidently shape the social diction of help-seekers. When faced with a relaxed co-worker, the help-seeker felt disappointed and unaccepted after being rejected. By contrast, when confronted with a stressful cue, help-seekers tended to exhibit relatively more positive emotions after been rejected. This study attempts to reveal the mechanism through which stress cues influence professional messaging interactions and collaboration. The findings could provide implications for the design of socio-emotional cues in the context of messaging.

Collective stress is the stress within a group or an organization. It affects individuals’ well-being and group productivity. HCI research has started exploring collective stress visualization to facilitate group awareness and collective coping via testing prototypes in controlled settings. However, an in-depth understanding of users’ needs and envisaged scenarios based on their authentic experiences are still lacking. In this study, we utilized a participatory approach called co-constructing stories to investigate how a collective stress visualization would be used in office workers’ authentic workday routines. We constructed use case stories with a group of office workers separately based on their personal lived experiences, using a design probe called AffectiveGarden. Our results categorized six clusters of benefits for collective coping through visualization and their implications for future design practice.

Stress-related health problems in children have increased in recent years, resulting in significant negative physical and mental impacts on children’s daily lives. This systematic review explores the potential of embodied technologies, such as robots, smart wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT), as tools for managing stress in children. The goal of this systematic review is to identify the design opportunities of embodied technologies in stress management, by looking for answers in terms of different technologies, users, issues, and challenges addressed in the 91 selected papers. Through the frequency and thematic analysis, we identified six main challenges and eight design opportunities for embodied technologies. Where there are gaps and opportunities in research, we propose to focus on connectivity and active sensing through connected objects, by exploring the potential of the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) as an M-health solution for providing real-time and personalized stress detection and interventions for children in various daily life settings.

Positive peer interaction in nursing homes has been consistently recognized as essential to residents’ life quality. However, low rates of resident-to-resident interaction were found to be pervasive. Our research explores the potential of applying public display systems to promote residents’ unplanned co-located interaction. This article describes the design and assessment of “Reading-to-Sharing” (R2S): a tabletop display system intended to improve nursing home residents’ social interaction by enhancing their public reading experience. R2S was assessed via supervised field trials, in which the participants were invited to experience R2S in real-life settings with necessary assistance. The objectives were mainly to investigate the participants’ engagement with R2S, user experience and the potential impact on residents’ social behaviors and feelings. The result showed that R2S was capable of engaging the participants in content viewing and sharing. It was effective in catalyzing and facilitating their social interaction. The participants’ perceived user experience was primarily favorable. Although R2S was anticipated to increase the participants’ mutual closeness, no statistically significant change was seen. The key implications were highlighted to guide the design of public display systems in this context.

Abstract Mementoes act as emotional companions that anchor stories. Older adults typically have a rich knowledge of family mementoes. However, storytelling and preservation of mementoes are still problematic for them: their mementoes are still mostly in physical format, which is difficult to share and preserve. Additionally, digital applications and websites for sharing mementoes usually are inaccessible for them. As a result, they spend much time collecting mementoes, but spend less time on telling and recording the related stories. In response to this, we report our study driven by the research questions: Rq1: What are the characteristics of older adults’ intergenerational memento storytelling? And Rq2: In which ways could a tangible display facilitate intergenerational memento storytelling for older adults? We designed a tangible device named Slots-Memento. We first conducted a preliminary evaluation to refine the prototype. In the field study, eight pairs of participants (each pair consisting of an older adult and his/her child) were recruited to use the prototype for around 1 week. Semi-structured interviews were then conducted both with the older adults and their children. Subsequently, mementoes collected were categorized and analyzed. Stories collected were firstly transcribed, then were conducted with structural and interactional analysis. In the concluding discussion, we present abstract implications for the research questions: two tables summarizing characteristics of their intergenerational memento storytelling, and related strategies of designing a tangible display individually.

Slow breathing guiding applications increasingly emerge, showing promise for helping knowledge workers to better cope with workaday stress. However, standard breathing guidance is non-interactive, with rigid paces. Despite their effects being proved, they could cause respiratory fatigue, or lack of training motivation, especially for novice users. To explore new design possibilities, we investigate using heart rate variability (HRV) data to mediate breathing guidance, which results in two HRV-enhanced guidance modes: (i) responsive breathing guidance and (ii) adaptive breathing guidance. These guidance modes are implemented on a soft haptic interface named “ViBreathe”. We conducted a user test (N = 24), and a one-week field deployment (N = 4) with knowledge workers, to understand the user experience of our design. The HRV-enhanced modes were generally experienced to reduce tiresome and improve engagement and comfort. And Vibreathe showed great potential for seamlessly weaving slow breathing practice into work routines. We thereby summarize related design insights and opportunities.

This issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction features contributions in the intersection of human-computer interaction and software engineering, with further disciplines blending into a rich set of scientific works. 2021 is the first time the annual conference on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS) is hosted in the Netherlands and in the context of an Industrial Design department. We take this opportunity to focus on the relations and influence of the design discipline on the work of the EICS community. This resulted in a new set of topics for EICS, which were already partly reflected in the many submissions we received in three extensive review rounds throughout 2020 and the beginning of 2021. In this editorial we offer a perspective on what EICS is not yet, looking at the inclusion of and interplay with design as a related discipline.

Social learning games can enhance students' learning engagement in the field of STEM. However, students do not always have the chance to experience social interactions during their learning activities. Augmented reality (AR) games have the ability to enable social interactions among students and allow them to interact with the virtual content while engaging in natural communication in the real world. However, little is still known on how to design social AR games for learning. In this paper, we presented a textbook-based AR social learning game for elementary school students to practice math together. We designed and developed the game concepts based on previous studies and co-design sessions and conducted a user study to explore how students would behave and interact with each other in the game. Our findings extend the understanding of students' social patterns in both collaboration and competition conditions under AR settings. Based on the findings, we propose design implications for designing AR social learning games in the future.

This paper presents a crowd-sourcing video-based investigation on the users' perception of proactiveness towards an object with artificial eyes through winking. Based on both the session initiation protocol (SIP) and the perceptual crossing paradigm, we synthesized a set of minimally-designed video clips and tested them in Amazon Mechanical Turk with 240 participants. The results show that, in both single- or multi-user scenarios, winking can be a useful expression that makes the user view the object as being proactive and encourages reciprocal input. We also discuss how the object-initiated interaction extends the perceptual crossing paradigm in human-object communication.

Mediated touch gestures are essential for delivering information in social networking. This study presents a method to create mediated touch gestures with vibrotactile stimuli for smart phones and explores the effectiveness of applying mediated touch gestures with vibrotactile stimuli when sending text and stickers in instant messaging applications. We developed a preliminary prototype to record vibration signals of touch gestures. The envelopes of the recorded signals are approximated by piecewise linear functions and then translated to MIDI parameters for generating vibrotactile stimuli. We applied mediated touch gestures in instant messaging applications as haptic icons. A user study showed that gesture traits and the contact time affected the sensation of haptic icons. The enhancement effect of touch gestures was influenced by the contact time.

Eye contact is crucial in social interactions, linking with sincerity and friendliness. However, blind people cannot see and make eye contact when they communicate with sighted people. It influences the involvement of blind people in blind-sighted conversations. Based on this context, we implemented Social glasses with an eye-tracking system, aiming to improve the communication quality between blind and sighted people in face-to-face conversations. Social glasses attempts to simulate the appropriate gaze for blind people, especially establishing the “eye contact” in blind-sighted conversations. To evaluate the impact of the interactive gaze displayed on the Social glasses, we performed dyadic-conversation tests under four experimental conditions (No Gaze, Constant Gaze, Random Gaze, and Interactive Gaze) for 40 participants. Quantitative results showed that the Interactive gaze has a positive impact on improving the communication quality between blind and sighted people, which were consistent with a qualitative analysis of the participants’ comments.

Driving is a social activity: Drivers need to coordinate and cooperate with each other to share the infrastructure. The relationship between drivers influences their driving behavior and experience. Lights, horn and speed are the most frequently used means to exchange information, limiting both the range and the bandwidth of the connectivity and leading to isolation, loneliness, and competition. We present “iSticker” and “MusicHound”, two concepts that aim to establish a connection by presenting similarity information between drivers. The two concepts were prototyped and evaluated with users in a driving simulator. The results showed that iSticker and MusicHound enhance drivers’ social closeness with each other and belongingness during the journey.

The wellbeing of people with dementia in long-term care facilities is hindered, as they spend most of their time alone with little engagement in meaningful activities and an absence of pleasant sensory stimulation. We designed an interactive system called LiveNature that adopts a novel combined approach involving an ambient display unit and an interactive robotic sheep, to offer long-term access and to engage people with dementia in long-term care facilities in rewarding experiences. LiveNature aims to provide holistic multi-sensory engagement to provoke positive emotions, increase social bonding, and restore attentiveness and communication. The design was implemented within a Dutch nursing home. An evaluation of the user experience and the effectiveness of the design was conducted in a real-life setting with nine participants, five family members, two caregivers and four volunteers, using observational rating scales and semi-structured interviews. The results of the rating scales and the findings from qualitative data showed evidence of enhanced positive engagement.

Augmented Reality is becoming an emerging trend in the development of play-and-learn experience and increasingly accessible to children. However, there is a lack of understanding of how to design AR games to effectively improve children's learning experience, especially with respect to the novel interaction and representation paradigms that AR affords. In this study, we describe the design and the implementation process of different interaction types (screen-touch and tangible interaction) and feedback mechanisms (non-diegetic feedback and diegetic feedback) in an AR math game for children aged 7 and 8. We report the insights based on our current prototypes and discuss the design implications for our future work.

Participating in physical activity (PA) is beneficial for adolescents' physical and mental development. Therefore, many studies have been conducted to design and evaluate interactive interventions to facilitate adolescents' PA. Despite the knowledge produced by this large number of studies, the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) still lacks a comprehensive set of guidelines to guide our design processes, help us make informed design decisions, as well as provide niche for innovation. This paper reports a systematic literature review of studies on technology-supported interventions in adolescents' PA. We reviewed 25 design related studies in HCI over the past 10 years, analyzing 1) the process phases of design practice, 2) the design requirements and related design decisions, and 3) how these phases and requirements are internally related to each other and what are their influence on design value. Our findings suggest four design phases with seven design requirements and its corresponding design decisions emerged in the process of design. Furthermore, we outline a framework to demonstrate the internal relations of design requirements. We generalize opportunities and challenges for supporting the aforementioned design decisions making, and implementing the findings for future design and research on technology-supported adolescents' PA.

Institutional care settings are often described as places where residents suffer from social isolation. In the past decades, conventional social interventions changed very little and had many limitations. Our research explores the potential of integrating technologies into public caring environments. In this paper, we present "R2S", a flexible platform in care homes to support residents' social interaction through augmenting public print media products. It aims to provide caregivers a convenient way to transform any print media into interactive surfaces, which can enhance residents' public reading experience and trigger communications. This paper describes the design motivation, the design and prototype implementation, preliminary user feedback and future plans.

Mementos carry personal symbolic meaning and can be used to privately reflect on the past or share memories[28]. Older adults spend much time collecting mementos but spend less time telling stories behind the mementos. Once they pass away, stories behind mementos vanish with their owners. In this paper, we present Slots-Memento, a tangible device aiming to facilitate intergenerational story sharing and preservation for older adults. It builds on the metaphor of slot-machine, and integrates functions of memento photo display, story recording, and preservation. Our design process started with context inquiry, older adults and young adults were recruited, aiming to understand the status quo of their memento storytelling, and define design requirements. A preliminary evaluation was conducted, discussion and future work are in the final part.

Physical Education (PE) is beneficial for students' mental and physical health, however, teenagers are increasingly becoming less motivated to actively participate in the current form of PE. Motivational studies show that collective physical activity augmented by playful interactions could encourage more participation and social engagement in physical activities (PA). In this paper, we present a within-subject field study with 20 teenagers formed into five groups sized equally. The study is conducted using Shuttlezap, a prototype that provides real-time playful audio augmentation to the process of the activity. Results show that the teenagers enjoyed playful audio augmentation and were socially engaged with an enhancement of their perception of competence. By further comparing the conditions between with and without the audio augmentation, we found that the playful audio augmentation positively contributed to the playfulness in terms of perceived relaxation and expression. We conclude with design implications for social play in the context of PE for teenagers.

This paper presents BioFidget, a biofeedback system that integrates physiological sensing and display into a smart fidget spinner for respiration training. We present a simple yet novel hardware design that transforms a fidget spinner into 1) a nonintrusive heart rate variability (HRV) sensor, 2) an electromechanical respiration sensor, and 3) an information display. The combination of these features enables users to engage in respiration training through designed tangible and embodied interactions, without requiring them to wear additional physiological sensors. The results of this empirical user study prove that the respiration training method reduces stress, and the proposed system meets the requirements of sensing validity and engagement with 32 participants in a practical setting.

Unwind is a musical biofeedback interface which combines nature sounds and sedative music into a form of New-Age music for relaxation exercises. The nature sounds respond to the user’s physiological data, functioning as an informative layer for biofeedback display. The sedative music aims to induce calmness and evoke positive emotions. UnWind incorporates the benefits of biofeedback and sedative music to facilitate deep breathing, moderate arousal, and promote mental relaxation. We evaluated Unwind in a 2 × 2 factorial experiment with music and biofeedback as independent factors. Forty young adults performed the relaxation exercise under one of the following conditions after experiencing a stressful task: Nature sounds only (NS), Nature sounds with music (NM), and Auditory biofeedback with nature sounds (NSBFB), and UnWind musical biofeedback (NMBFB). The results revealed a significant interaction effect between music and biofeedback on the improvement of heart rate variability. The combination of music and nature sounds also showed benefits in lowering arousal and reducing self-report anxiety. We conclude with a discussion of UnWind for biofeedback and the wider potential of blending nature sounds with music as a musical interface.

Light is a common ambient medium to express additional information in a peripheral and calm way, but it is also an environmental stimulant to create atmosphere, evoke moods, and provide immersive experiences. Through the design of the DeLight system, we aim to establish a biofeedback-driven lighting environment that informs users about their stress level for intervention and assists them in biofeedback relaxation training. In this study, DeLight is interfaced with a heart rate variability biofeedback system with two modes for different purposes: stress intervention and relaxation assistance. We evaluated the prototype of DeLight in two user studies. The results of the first study show that DeLight has the potential for stress intervention; the HRV biofeedback through the changes of ambient light could improve a user’s awareness of stress and trigger behavioral conditioning, such as deep breathing. The results of the second study confirm that DeLight has potential as a new biofeedback interface for relaxation assistance; biofeedback through an immersive lighting environment can support physiological regulation as effectively as graphic biofeedback; it offers enhanced relaxation effects regarding both subjective experience and physiological arousal. These findings suggest that the biofeedback-driven ambient light can perform as persuasive technology in the domain of health self-management. The combination of decorative and informative aspects enables the lighting interface to offer the users a comfortable and relaxing condition for biofeedback-assisted relaxation training.

In today;s highly competitive environment, chronic stress is one of the main reasons for a health problem. To address this, biofeedback techniques have been used to assist in relaxation training and stress management. In this paper, we present "StressTree," a metaphorical visualization of heart rate variability (HRV) biofeedback system. StressTree aims to present HRV data in a more evocative, meaningful way in the context of stress management. The HRV biofeedback system consists of a heartbeat data acquisition unit, a data analysis unit, and a visualization unit. The feedback from interviews in the evaluation shows that StressTree could display different growth pattern during a stressful work or a relaxation training. The participants suggested that the biofeedback interaction through StressTree is explicit and engaging, and brings them a strong motivation to regulate their breathing pattern for a "healthy-looking" tree.

It is not difficult to design an object that is sensitive to our gaze. The challenging part is to make the user realize it. And since people are not used to interacting with an object by simply moving their eyes (people use eyes to see, not to trigger something), the interaction itself become unfamiliar to them. Based on the gaze behavior of people socializing with others, we believe that the feeling of being looked back when interacting with a gaze sensitive object is rather crucial in order to overcome the problem of unfamiliarity and to make people naturally realize that the object was sensitive to their gaze behavior. To achieve this feeling, we conclude that eyes need to be presence in the user's view. In this paper, we present an anthropomorphize coffee machine called the CoffeePet, attached with two, small OLED screen that displays animated eyes. These eyes are responsive towards the user's gaze behavior. Furthermore, the CoffeePet will automatically start to brew the drink if the user manages to maintain a prolonged eye contact with it. In three experiments, we investigated the impact of the animated eyes in aiding the participants to become familiar and to realize that their gaze behavior influences the CoffeePet to react. Without being told on how to interact with the CoffeePet, participants were randomly assigned to participate in one of three conditions. 1) CoffeePet with watching eyes (eyes with direct gaze), 2) CoffeePet with interactive gaze model, and 3) CoffeePet with interactive gaze following. The results showed that the interactive sharing gaze did, in fact, lead the participants to become familiar and to realize that they can interact with the object by simply moving their eyes.

The feeling of being looked back when we look at someone and that someone is also aware that we are looking at him/her is a basic fundamental during social interaction. This situation can only occur if both realize the presence of each other. Based on these theories, this research is motivated in exploiting the possibility of designing for a gaze sensitive object - how people can relate to object by depending on their eyes only. In this paper, we present a gaze-activated coffee machine called the CoffeePet attached with two small, OLED screen that will displays animated eyes. These eyes are responsive towards the user's gaze behavior. Furthermore, we used a sensor module (HVC Omron) to detect and track the eyes of a user in real time. It gives the ability for the user to interact with the CoffeePet simply by moving their eyes. The CoffeePet is also able to automatically brew and pour the coffee out of its spout if it feels appropriate during the interaction. We further explain the description of the system, modification of the real product, and the experimental plan to compare the user's perception of the CoffeePet's eyes and to investigate whether the user realizes or not that their gaze behavior influences the CoffeePet to react.

The road environment can be seen as a social situation: Drivers need to coordinate with each other to share the infrastructure. In addition to the driving behaviour itself, lights, horn and speed are the most frequently used means to exchange information, limiting both the range and the bandwidth of the connectivity and leading to misunderstanding and conflict. With everywhere available connectivity and the broad penetration of social network services, the relationship between drivers on the road may gain more transparency, enabling social information to pass through the steel shell of the cars and giving opportunities to reduce misunderstanding and strengthen empathy. In this study, we present "CarNote", a concept that aims to reduce misunderstanding and conflict between drivers by showing their emergency driving status to others. This concept was prototyped and evaluated with users in a driving simulator. The results showed that CarNote enhances drivers' empathy, increases forgiveness and decreases anger to others on the road.

This paper presents the work-in-progress prototype of i-Ribbon---a wearable device designed to elicit values in the context of weight loss. Starting with an Obesity Awareness Ribbon, we introduced the i-Ribbon concept. For prototyping, we built a system that could extract user's personal health-related data through a mobile application and sent it to a wearable device. The functional prototype enabled us to implement different interaction strategies to elicit corresponding values. Base on the reflection on design and prototyping process, possibilities of future research were identified.

Calm technology has been stressed in designing the interaction with information, especially in ubiquitous computing, peripheral interaction and ambient display. Inspired by the research on calm technology and model-based sonification, we aim to build a model of nature soundscape for supporting calm information display. A three-layer structure is proposed for construction of the nature soundscape. The structure includes seven acoustic parameters. By setting each of seven acoustic parameters into three levels, seven groups of soundscape samples were created and evaluated in an experiment with 20 participants. Each participant was exposed to 21 soundscape samples to assess each sample regarding seven perceptual attributes through a rating scale. Based on the results, a perceptual model is proposed to link the acoustic parameters of individual nature sounds and the perceptual attributes of the nature soundscape. The developed model offers the designers and practitioners a new tool to utilize nature sounds in the design of the auditory display which could support the calm technology.

Driving is a social activity, and therefore driving is not only a matter of skills but also of emotion. Numerous studies show that aggressive driving makes a significant contribution to traffic accident involvement. In previous research, a concept based on Driver to Driver communication employing location-based services was proposed that enables road users to express their disapproval and appreciation of others' driving behavior. In the current study, a complete prototype based on this concept, which enables participants to send and receive feedback while driving and review their behavior afterwards, was developed. The acceptance and influence of driving behaviour of this concept were investigated in a driving simulator. It was found that the system positively influenced people's driving behavior and was accepted by most participants.

Eye gaze plays an essential role in social interaction which influences our perception of others. It is most likely that we can perceive the existence of another intentional subject through the act of cathing one another's eyes. Based on the notion of perceptual crossing, we aim to establish a meaningful social interaction that emerges out of the perceptual crossing between a person and an everyday object by exploiting the gazing behavior of the person as the input modality for the system. We investigated in literature the experiments that adopt the perceptual crossing as their foundation, lessons learned from literature were used as input for a concept to create meaningful social interaction. We used an eye-tracker to measure gaze behavior that allows the participant to interact with the object by using their eyes through active exploration. It creates a situation where both of them mutually becoming aware of each other's existence. Further, we discuss the motivation for this research, present a preliminary experiment that influences our decision and our directions for future work.

Our eye gaze is important during social interactions. It can generate significant social cues in nonverbal communication. The feeling of being look back when we are gazing at someone influences our social behaviour. In this paper, we propose an interactive coffee cup that is responsive whenever a person is fixating on it. Taking the user's gazing behaviour as our system input modality, we want to create an environment where a person may establish social interaction with an everyday object whenever he/she is looking at it. To make an object visible to the user's eyes and for the user to feel connected with the object, it is expected that the object to possess distinctive characteristics that can acknowledge the user that it is aware of being look at. By combining the recent technology of eye trackers, mechanical design and embedded electronics, we want to explore the possibility of nonverbal social interaction between a person and inanimate object that will respond when a person is looking at it to allow social interaction and to create a sense of emotional bond between the two.

In anthropomorphic design, there has been increasing interests in using kinetic motion and shape changing of the physical objects as a medium to communicate with people. In this paper, we introduce an interactive installation named Whispering Bubbles to explore anthropomorphism through shape-changing interfaces embedded in a physical space. It aims to provide a poetic place for people to whisper with the organically shaped objects (bubbles), to help people release mental stress in their modern lives. When a person approaches bubbles within a given distance, slight up-and-down movements of the bubbles will be activated by infrared sensors embedded in the space; when a person stands nearby a bubble and whispers to it, the bubble will "hear" with its sound detector and be triggered to bend towards the person, indicating engagement in listening. A scale model is implemented to explore and demonstrate interactions.

In face-to-face communication, eye gaze is integral to a conversation to supplement verbal language. The sighted often uses eye gaze to convey nonverbal information in social interactions, which a blind conversation partner cannot access and react to them. In this paper, we present E-Gaze glasses (E-Gaze), an assistive device based on an eye tracking system. It simulates gaze for the blind person to react and engage the sighted in face-to-face conversations. It is designed based on a model that combines eye-contact mechanism and turn-taking strategy. We further propose an experimental design to test the E-Gaze and hypothesize that the model-driven gaze simulation can enhance the conversation quality between the sighted and the blind person in face-to-face communication.

Gaze and eye contact are frequently in social occasions used among sighted people. Gaze is considered as a predictor of attention and engagement between interlocutors in conversations. However, gaze signals from the sighted are not accessible for the blind person in face-to-face communication. In this paper, we present functional work-in-progress prototype, E-Gaze glasses, an assistive device based on an eye tracking system. E-Gaze simulates natural gaze for blind people, especially establishing the "eye contact" between blind and sighted people to enhance their engagement in face-to-face conversations. The gaze behavior is designed based on a turn-taking model, which interprets the corresponding relationship between the conclusive gaze behavior and the interlocutors' conversation flow.

Gaze signals, frequently used by the sighted in social interactions as visual cues, are hardly accessible for low-vision and blind people. A concept is proposed to help the blind people access and react to gaze signals in face-to-face communication. 20 blind and low-vision participants were interviewed to discuss the features of this concept. One feature of the concept is further developed into a prototype, namely Tactile Band, to aim at testing the hypothesis that tactile feedback can enable the blind person to feel attention (gaze signals) from the sighted, enhancing the level of engagement in face-to-face communication. We tested our hypothesis with 30 participants with a face-to-face conversation scenario, in which the blindfolded and the sighted participants talked about a given daily topic. Comments from the participants and the reflection on the experiment provided useful insights for improvements and further research.

Heart Calligraphy is a biofeedback installation that creates abstract portraits of participants with their heartbeat data using a pen plotter. The real-time heart rate is mapped to the basic parameters of the pen's behaviors, namely speed, position, pressure and pen-down time. Due to the natural variability in heart rate, every portrait becomes personal and unique graphic, which reflects the natural biorhythm inside human body. The installation explores the role of the body as a channel through which physiology manifests itself in a form of beauty.

In this paper we describe the concept, design and implementation of LivingSurface, an interactive wall-like surface as a shape-changing display of biofeedback. The surface changes its shape responding to an individual's physiological data, reflecting the internal bodily processes. The surface design basically consists of two layers: the pattern layer (front layer) and the actuating layer (back layer). The first is a complex paper-based structure with repetitive incisions created by laser cutting. The actuating layer serves as a medium transforming the force from servomotors, vibration motors or fans into an action on the pattern layer. The cutout patterns are stimulated to vibrate, swing, bulge, or rotate which is used to display physiological information in dynamic physical form. This work has been exhibited on Milan Design Week 2015; we collected and analyzed the feedback from the visitors during the exhibition and discuss the possibilities of the proposed surfaces as a shape-changing interface of biofeedback or an ambient display of information.

Gaze signals are frequently used by the sighted in social interactions as visual cues. However, these signals and cues are hardly accessible for people with visual disability. A conceptual design of E-Gaze glasses is proposed, assistive to create gaze communication between blind and sighted people in face-to-face conversations. We interviewed 20 totally blind and low vision participants to envision the use of the E-Gaze. We explained four features of E-Gaze to participants using persona and use scenarios. Participants discussed the features on their usefulness, efficiency and interest. The results helped us clarify the design direction and further research.

Producing educational serious games can be costly and time-consuming. The Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach of software development can offer a solution to reduce costs and foment serious games development. In this work, we apply a model called Activity Theory-based Model of Serious Games (ATMSG) for identifying existing relevant components that can be reused for different educational serious games. We apply the derived structure to classify the elements of an existing game and to identify how it can be refactored and expanded following the SOA paradigm.

In this paper, we describe our ongoing work towards understanding how interactive comics could affect time perception. An interactive comic story, The Dreaming Wine, has been created based on our current understanding of interactive comics, time perception and the relation between both. As a starting point for our research, we conducted an experiment on whether the amount of panels would affect the time perception of the comic reader. A list of principles was applied in splitting comic panels. The findings of the experiment are expected to provide a better understanding of how panels in interactive comics have an effect on the reader’s time perception.

Immersive mixed reality environments offer new possibilities to reproduce reality or embodied presence with constructing elaborate fantasy worlds and provide to the user an intense and seemingly real experience. Mixed reality gives possibilities to create deeply dimensional narratives and simulations that put the user in the center of the action. In this work we describe an interactive mixed reality installation named Alice, consisting of six separate stages based on the narrative “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland”. To be able to achieve the intended experience we have to build complex and heterogeneous distributed system, composed of sensors, actuators, virtual reality, application components and variety of processing components that manage the flow of context information between the sensors/actuators and applications.

When we connect smart devices to one another we open up many new possibilities. One interesting possibility is to support high-level semantic interaction without requiring multiple steps on multiple devices. In this paper we investigate how ontologies, runtime task models, Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) models, and the blackboard architectural pattern may be used to enable semantic interaction for pervasive computing. An initial demonstrator was developed to visualize and manipulate semantic connections between devices in a smart home environment. The demonstrator provides a way for users to physically interact with devices on a high level of semantic abstraction without being bothered with the low-level details.

In envisioned smart environments, enabled by ubiquitous computing technologies, electronic objects will be able to interconnect and interoperate. How will users of such smart environments make sense of the connections that are made and the information that is exchanged? This Internet of Things could have a life of its own, exchanging digital concepts and values between its members, having an understanding of each other and communicating in their own language. In this paper we report on an ongoing research project in the context of smart home environments. We discuss possibilities to represent this digital world in the physical reality we live in, by providing handles to control and clues to understand, build conceptual models of connections that exist or can be made. This is achieved by making semantic abstractions of low-level events and presenting them to users at a higher level, in a simplified fashion. Furthermore, we used an ontology to describe the low-level events, and used reasoning to infer high-level meaningful information. Although we are in the preliminary stages of our research, we consider it worthwhile to share and illustrate our findings by presenting a demonstrator, that implements our ideas in a home entertainment scenario.

The CHI conference has grown rapidly over the last 26 years. We present a quantitative analysis on the countries and organizations that contribute to its success. Only 7.8 percent of the countries are responsible for 80 percent of the papers in the CHI proceedings, and the USA is clearly the country with most papers. But the success of a country or organization does not depend only on the number of accepted papers, but also on their quality. We present a ranking of countries and organizations based on the h index, an indicator that tries to balance the quantity and quality of scientific output based on a bibliometric analysis. The bibliometric analysis also allowed us to demonstrate the difficulty of judging quality. The papers acknowledged by the best paper award committee were not cited more often than a random sample of papers from the same years. The merit of the award is therefore unclear, and it might be worthwhile to allow the visitor to the conference to vote for the best paper.

Whereas formal specification and verification have shown value by improving reliability and trustworthiness of traditional industrial systems, we made a contribution by applying them to the field of distributed multimedia presentations in an ambient intelligence context. We investigate a mapping problem in which media needs are to be satisfied using given presentation resources. The goal of the investigation is to see whether Broy's stream-based component framework can be used to model media-related interfaces and constraints in an elegant way. The formalization will serve as a framework for the development of an automated mapper that can handle real media needs and real presentation resources. It combines the well-known notations of Z with an underlying concurrency theory. We show that not only verification issues can be handled such as bandwidth and delay constraints, but also architecture-level issues such as network structural media-type compatibilities