Chronic pain (CP) both significantly affects individuals’ wellbeing, and complicates care for many. CP’s unpredictable nature, diverse causes, and frequent need for inter-medical-disciplinary coordination has made it a priority for bespoke digital interventions from virtual reality headsets to online fora. Many however report limited benefits from existing digital tools, and the potential of technology to enhance daily life for those with CP remains largely untapped. This paper in response embraces a participatory design approach to everyday mundane chronic pain technology. We report findings from an analysis of the r/chronicpain subreddit, focus groups conducted with the support of a national chronic pain organisation and a workshop conducted with members of this community, yielding a novel prototype pacing application. Through this paper, we contribute insight into the experience of living with chronic pain and implications for technology design and research practices to support everyday care.

25th ACM Interaction Design and Children 25th Conference (IDC 2026). June 22nd – 25th 2026, Brighton UK

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has been critiqued for grounding technologies for disabled people in ableist paradigms, where the emphasis is placed on ‘fixing’ autism rather than supporting autistic people. In contrast, the neurodiversity paradigm has helped many autistic people to develop an autistic identity, foster greater self-esteem, and build a sense of belonging within the broader neurodiversity community. Yet, little is known about how digital technologies might support information-seeking and self-reflection practices that contribute to autistic identity formation. Most HCI literature has largely focused on children, and has overlooked the experiences of autistic adults with intersecting gender and ethnic identities. This study addresses that gap by reporting findings from a survey (N=21) and participatory design workshops (n=8), where autistic cis and transgender women, as well as non-binary adults, reflected on their journeys towards identifying as autistic following a late autism diagnosis, and evaluated a prototype conversational agent designed to support this process. Our findings highlight the value of compassionate participatory design practices and contribute guidelines for designing agents that can support autistic adults and their identity formation.

One of the most important tests available to assess human vision is the visual field test, or perimetry. While imaging of the fundus and standard tests such as Snellen charts can assess factors such as acuity, and identify damaged parts of the retina, only the visual field test can measure the subjective field of view of perception from the patient side. We introduce a Virtual Reality (VR)-based perimetry test. A systematic test for measuring the visual field function conducted in VR. The VR-based test is precise enough to supersede the standard perimetry test carried out on either a Goldmann or Octopus test machine. Using VR allows for a more comfortable experience and opens up for further development that can potentially be used to map out other deficiencies of the visual field function. It also provides the ability to gamify the test allowing it to be carried out on children. Here we present some of the considerations and implementation details which ensure that our software has the necessary capabilities of producing correct measurements and valid results.

Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health problem, and cognitive-behavioral therapy is one of the most widely used, evidence-based treatments. While several mobile apps for anxiety that integrate cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques exist, ma- jor challenges remain concerning uptake and engagement. Personalization is one strategy that can be used to improve client engagement, and integrating therapist input is one mechanism for such personalization. This study aims to understand therapist practices and identify new possibilities for delivering intervention content between face-to-face CBT therapy sessions. It comprised semi-structured interviews, followed by a series of ideation activities, and thematic analysis of the data. The results showed the central role of clients in shaping the content of therapy sessions, their challenges with homework practice, and therapists’ diverse practices. Analysis of the ideation activities elaborated the potential role of therapists in the personalization of apps for anxiety. We conclude with takeaways for designers of personalized mental health mobile applications.

Ethical deliberation has proved a consistent feature of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) since its earliest years, spanning the respectful involvement of research participants to design choices impacting fairness, freedom and welfare. Despite growing discussions, applied knowledge and practical approaches for navigating complex moral dilemmas remain challenging to grasp. Motivated by the need for a structured overview, this paper contributes a scoping review of ethics as discussed across 129 full-length SIGCHI papers containing the search term ‘ethic*’ in their title, abstract or authors’ keywords over the last ten years. Findings show increasing prioritisation of the topic, particularly within Artificial Intelligence. Value-Sensitive and Critical Design appear as the most frequently applied orientations, and participatory approaches are more prevalent than those without end-user input. Engaging with a spectrum from personal to societal concerns, the SIGCHI literature thus echos calls for critical perspectives on user-centred processes and the need to establish more sustainable responsibility structures.

User acceptance is key for the successful uptake and use of health technologies, but also impacted by numerous factors not always easily accessible nor operationalised by designers in practice. This work seeks to facilitate the application of acceptance theory in design practice through the Technology Acceptance (TAC) toolkit: a novel theory-based design tool and method comprising 16 cards, 3 personas, 3 scenarios, a virtual think-space, and a website, which we evaluated through workshops conducted with 21 designers of health technologies. Findings showed that the toolkit revised and extended designers’ knowledge of technology acceptance, fostered their appreciation, empathy and ethical values while designing for acceptance, and contributed towards shaping their future design practice. We discuss implications for considering user acceptance a dynamic, multi-stage process in design practice, and better supporting designers in imagining distant acceptance challenges. Finally, we examine the generative value of the TAC toolkit and its possible future evolution.

The growing commercial success of smart speaker devices following recent advancements in speech recognition technology has surfaced new opportunities for collecting self-reported health and well-being data. Speech-enabled conversational agents (CAs) in particular, deployed in home environments using just such systems, may offer increasingly intuitive and engaging means of self-report. To date, however, few real-world studies have examined users’ experiences of engaging in the self-report of mental health using such devices or the challenges of deploying these systems in the home context. With these aims in mind, this article recounts findings from a 4-week “in-the-wild” study during which 20 individuals with depression or bipolar disorder used a speech-enabled CA named “Sofia” to maintain a daily diary log, responding also to the World Health Organization–Five Well-Being Index WHO-5 scale every 2 weeks. Thematic analysis of post-study interviews highlights actions taken by participants to overcome CAs’ limitations, diverse personifications of a speech-enabled agent, and unique forms of valuing of this system among users’ personal and social circles. These findings serve as initial evidence for the potential of CAs to support the self-report of mental health and well-being, while highlighting the need to address outstanding technical limitations in addition to design challenges of conversational pattern matching, filling unmet interpersonal gaps, and the use of self-report CAs in the at-home social context. Based on these insights, we discuss implications for the future design of CAs to support the self-report of mental health and well-being.

Mobile technologies are valuable tools for the self-report of mental health and wellbeing. These systems pose many unique design challenges which have received considerable attention within HCI, including the engagement of users. However, less attention has been paid to the use of personal devices in public health. Integrating self-reported data within the context of clinical care suggests the need to design interfaces to support data management, sense-making, risk-assessment, feedback and patient-provider relationships. This paper reports on a qualitative design study for the clinical interface of a mobile application for the self-report of psychological wellbeing and depression during pregnancy. We examine the design tensions which arise in managing the expectations and informational needs of pregnant women, midwives, clinical psychologists, GPs and other health professionals with respect to a broad spectrum of wellbeing. We discuss strategies for managing these tensions in the design of technologies required to balance personal information with public health.

Perinatal depression (PND) affects up to 15% of women within the United Kingdom and has a lasting impact on a woman's quality of life, birth outcomes and her child's development. Suicide is the leading cause of maternal mortality. However, it is estimated that at least 50% of PND cases go undiagnosed. This paper presents the results of the first feasibility study to examine the potential of mobile devices to engage women in antenatal mental health screening. Using a mobile application, 254 women attending 14 National Health Service midwifery clinics provided 2,280 momentary and retrospective reports of their wellbeing over a 9-month period. Women spoke positively of the experience, installing and engaging with this technology regardless of age, education, wellbeing, number of children, marital or employment status, or past diagnosis of depression. 39 women reported a risk of depression, self-harm or suicide; two-thirds of whom were not identified by screening in-clinic.

There has been a surge in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies co-opted by or designed for people with visual disabilities. Researchers and engineers have pushed technical boundaries in areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, location inference, and wearable computing. But what do people with visual disabilities imagine as their own technological future? To explore this question, we developed and carried out tactile ideation workshops with participants in the UK and India. Our participants generated a large and diverse set of ideas, most focusing on ways to meet needs related to social interaction. In some cases, this was a matter of recognizing people. In other cases, they wanted to be able to participate in social situations without foregrounding their disability. It was striking that this finding was consistent across UK and India despite substantial cultural and infrastructural differences. In this paper, we describe a new technique for working with people with visual disabilities to imagine new technologies that are tuned to their needs and aspirations. Based on our experience with these workshops, we provide a set of social dimensions to consider in the design of new AI technologies: social participation, social navigation, social maintenance, and social independence. We offer these social dimensions as a starting point to forefront users' social needs and desires as a more deliberate consideration for assistive technology design.

Health and wellbeing applications increasingly raise ethical issues for design. User-centred and participatory design approaches, while grounded in everyday wisdom, cannot be expected to address ethical reflection consistently, as multiple value systems come into play. We explore the potential of phronesis, a concept from Aristotelian virtue ethics, for mHealth design. Phronesis describes wisdom and judgment garnered from practical experience of specific situations in context. Applied phronesis contributes everyday wisdom to challenging issues for vulnerable target users. Drawing on research into mHealth technologies for psychological wellbeing, we explore how phronesis can inform ethical design. Using a case study on an app for self-reporting symptoms of depression during pregnancy, we present a framework for incorporating a phronetic approach into design, involving: (a) a wide feedback net to capture phronetic input early in design; (b) observing the order of feedback, which directly affects value priorities in design; (c) ethical pluralism recognising different coexisting value systems; (d) acknowledging subjectivity in the disclosure and recognition of individual researcher and participant values. We offer insights into how a phronetic approach can contribute everyday wisdom to designing mHealth technologies to help designers foster the values that promote human flourishing.