Family health informatics tools can help support well-being with shared data tracking. Prior work typically focused on shared data review, but often in specific moments, like bedtime, or centered on caregiving of children or elderly members. To investigate how tracking can support mutual health collaboration between family members pervasively across daily contexts, we designed and deployed FamilyBloom, a glanceable smartwatch and home display system for mood and goal tracking. Twelve families with both neurotypical and ADHD members used FamilyBloom for three months on average. Our findings reveal how family-centered tracking created collaboration opportunities and tensions across multiple ecological systems: individual self-regulation, collaborations within family dynamics, involvement of care networks with varying trust levels, institutional school constraints and cultural stigma, and temporality of regular routines and crisis periods. We discuss an ecosystem-aware approach to family informatics, wherein design can attend to how families navigate multiple contexts while sustaining family-level collaboration.

Recent HCI research emphasizes the importance of considering children's care ecosystems in the design of systems that support their well-being, including not only family, but also extended support networks, such as teachers and therapists.While this approach offers opportunities for care and collaboration, it also introduces challenges such as recruitment, appropriate methods, power dynamics, navigating diverse perspectives, and ethical considerations.This workshop 1 seeks to bring together IDC researchers and practitioners to discuss opportunities, challenges, methods, and tools towards a research agenda for designing technologies for and with children and their care ecosystems.It also aims to foster collaboration and strengthen the community by facilitating networking among researchers towards conducting multi-stakeholder research.

Family informatics often uses shared data dashboards to promote awareness of each other’s health-related behaviors. However, these interfaces often stop short of providing families with needed guidance around how to improve family functioning and health behaviors. We consider the needs of family co-regulation with ADHD children to understand how in-home displays can support family well-being. We conducted three co-design sessions with each of eight families with ADHD children who had used a smartwatch for self-tracking. Results indicate that situated displays could nudge families to jointly use their data for learning and skill-building. Accommodating individual needs and preferences when family members are alone is also important, particularly to support parents exploring their co-regulation role, and assisting children with data interpretation and guidance on self and co-regulation. We discuss opportunities for displays to nurture multiple intents of use, such as joint or independent use, while potentially connecting with external expertise.

Challenges associated with ADHD affect children’s daily routines and response to environmental stimuli, and support from parents is helpful in managing and overcoming behavior regulation challenges. Positive reinforcement is increasingly integrated into family technologies for teaching regulation skills, but typically support specific co-located activities. To better understand how technology can support co-regulation within families with ADHD children, we deployed CoolTaco, a smartwatch and phone system to support collaboration in creating tasks, gaining points for achieving them, and redeeming rewards. Ten families with ADHD children used CoolTaco in their daily routines. By qualitatively analyzing family interviews and usage logs, we find that smartwatches can help provide pervasive regulation support to children, but the division across devices and parent-child roles interfere with developing independence. We discuss how technology should support co-regulation while also fostering future self-regulation, such as by guiding children in goal setting and helping them reflect on progress and achievements.

Digital food journaling can support personal goals, such as weight loss and developing healthy eating behaviors. However, traditional manual tracking demands great effort, often leading to lapses or abandonment. We explore opportunities for journaling with multiple input modalities and devices, leveraging people's daily interactions with a range of technologies. We report on an extended analysis of 15 participants' experiences with ModEat, a prototype supporting journaling with several input modalities on phone, computer, and voice assistants. Participants' modality and device preferences were largely influenced by their goals, but they frequently deviated from those preferences depending on device availability, perceived affordances, and characteristics of foods eaten. Participants rarely combined input modalities in entries, but some described that doing so allowed for more detailed journaling or serve as a placeholder for later. We discuss advantages and drawbacks of multimodal tracking and potential strategies for improving interactions.

Children with ADHD can experience a wide variety of challenges related to self-regulation, which can lead to poor educational, health, and wellness outcomes. Technological interventions, such as mobile and wearable health systems, can support data collection and reflection about health status. However, little is known about how ADHD children interpret such data. We conducted a deployment study with 10 children, aged 10 to 15, for six weeks, during which they used a smartwatch in their homes. Results from observations and interviews during this study indicate that children with ADHD can interpret their own health data, particularly at the moment. However, as ADHD children develop more autonomy, smartwatch systems may require alternatives for data reflection that are interpretable and actionable for them. This work contributes to the scholarly discourse around health data visualization, particularly in considering implications for the design of health technologies for children with ADHD.

Journaling of consumed foods through digital devices is a popular self-tracking strategy for weight loss and eating mindfulness. Research has explored modalities, like photos and open-ended text and voice descriptions, to make journaling less burdensome and more descriptive than traditional barcode and database searches. However, less is known about how people prefer to journal foods when less constrained by limitations of databases, natural language processing, and image recognition. We deployed a food journal prototype supporting varied devices and input modalities, which 15 participants used to journal 1008 food logs over two weeks. Participants had diverse strategies for indicating what and how much they ate, varying from ambiguous foods to specifying varieties and using different measurements for clarifying amount. Some strategies were interpretable by natural language food identification and image classification services, while others point to open research questions. We finally discuss opportunities for accounting for variance in food journaling.