While visual augmentation dominates the augmented reality landscape, devices like Meta Ray-Ban audio smart glasses signal growing industry movement toward audio augmented reality (AAR). Hearing is a primary channel for sensing context, anticipating change, and navigating social space, yet AAR's everyday potential remains underexplored. We address this gap through a collaborative autoethnography (N=5, authoring) and an online survey (N=74). We identify ten roles for AAR, grouped into three categories: task- and utility-oriented, emotional and social, and perceptual collaborator. These roles are further layered with a rhythmic and embodied collaborator framing, mapping them onto micro-, meso-, and macro-rhythms of everyday life. Our analysis surfaces nuanced tensions, such as blocking distractions without erasing social presence, highlighting the need for context-aware design. This paper contributes a foundational and forward-looking framework for AAR in everyday life, providing design groundwork for systems attuned to daily routines, sensory engagement, and social expectations.

Trauma-informed design is an important yet challenging area due to required expertise for careful engagement with the vulnerable and traumatized person, particularly with children. While technologies have the potential to generate value for the person with experience of trauma, the risk of exposing them to additional trauma due to research and design has ethical implications. We explore this space by engaging with therapists and social workers as dyads of proxies for parents and children with a history of trauma. We conducted a study as a participatory workshop with proxies to understand how technology could support parents in coaching social-emotional learning during episodes of high intensity emotion and difficult behavior by the child. Our findings identified design qualities to embed in SEL technology, and three roles that parents can play in implementing SEL strategies at home. We contribute a set of seven methodological guidelines for dyadic trauma-informed participatory design with proxies.

Acquired brain injuries have many complexities, largely affecting motor and cognitive functioning. Occupational therapists often use switches attached to electronics that activate the devices to give people with disabilities the ability to interact with toys and electronics. However, current switches on the market are expensive, break easily and are unable to customize. We ran two co-design workshops and follow-up interviews with 14 occupational therapists specializing in students with acquired brain injuries. In phase one, the occupation therapists built three soft switches and brainstormed iterations. In phase two, we gained valuable insights into the iterations from occupational therapists. This paper contributes to Human-Computer Interaction as a case study, designs guidelines to support co-design with occupational therapists, and discusses the potential of adaptive soft switches. This work contributes to the growing literature around supporting occupational therapists as makers and how researchers can support them during the co-design process.

Sign language serves as a bridge between the hearing-impaired and other people. Existing sensor-based approaches tend to only collect data from the dominant hand. Does this signal collection method affect the accuracy of gesture recognition, especially gestures where the dominant hand has the same movement while the non-dominant hand has different movements? The specific gestures are called same-right-and-different-left (SRDL) where the right hand is dominant. This article is the first to propose an SRDL-aware sign language recognition system. First, an SRDL discriminator based on an autoencoder and range classifier is designed to determine whether the gesture is SRDL. Second, an SRDL feature selector based on clustering relationship is presented. Multivariate variational mode decomposition and fast fourier transform are used to obtain the feature expression. Moreover, a clustering relationship algorithm is proposed to dynamically select features for every group of SRDL gestures in the feature expression. Finally, the experimental results show that the average word error rate is 14.3% and decreases by 8.5% and 12.1% compared with Signspeaker and MyoSign, respectively.

Amblyopia is a common neurodevelopmental condition affecting people's vision and quality of life. Follow up treatment plays an essential role in improving amblyopia, and experts have proposed embroidery as a potential activity many times. The low compliance of amblyopia patients is one of the impediments. However, there are currently no targeted embroidery activities designed for patients. Designing embroidery activities to meet the needs of amblyopia patients in human-computer interaction and increasing patient compliance has become a design challenge in the current research field. In this research, we present an autobiographical design process to explore the augmentation of traditional embroidery activities with computationally generated patterns based on the stitching preferences of the user. We propose two design considerations for future research: Design with technology to assist traditional handcrafting and personalized design for long-term follow-up treatment through lived experience.

The cognitive complexities of emotions and individualized coping strategies make it a difficult space for design. Collecting first-person data can provide nuanced understanding of the lived experience of emotional life, to better inform the design of wearable technologies for emotional self-regulation. We present a preliminary study of our first-person phenomenological approach to autobiographical design. The methodology is unique for the intertwining of emotional activities and mindfulness exercises, as a strategy for controlling emotional repercussions. Self-observation and documentation included journaling and sketching using the Inside-Out Probe workbook, followed by material prototyping and testing in-the-wild. The Breathing Scarf prototype embodies the design considerations. In designing for one to support personalized self-regulation strategies, key considerations include designing for personal comfort, ownership, and individual-over-social meaning-making. Of equal importance in the design research process are the well-being of the designer/researcher, the ability to self-regulate emotions, and the ethics of care and emotion work.