Regular microbreaks from work positively contribute to one’s well-being, performance, and recovery, yet integrating them into work routine can be challenging. In response, we present Zenscape, a novel tangible system that encourages regular microbreaks through a subtle stirring water action and sound. Zenscape aims to improve the quality of the microbreaks by inviting user participation in creative micro activities that are inspired from Zen Garden philosophy. We conducted field deployments of Zenscape with seven participants who interacted with the system daily for at least 2 weeks. The study revealed that the physicality of the system brought discipline to participants’ work routine and interacting with the Zen Garden made microbreaks refreshing. Participants took frequent breaks with Zenscape, found themselves more productive and less tired at the end of the day. Based on study insights, we present three design considerations to guide the design of the future technologies for supporting regular microbreaks.

This pictorial illustrates the design and making of a carefully crafted multi-sensory spice kit, Stardust, to encourage and nurture self-care in everyday practice. Stardust contains a set of dotted pattern cards and a secret set of 9 spices. The user engages with the kit by poking holes in the pattern card to reveal a unique art and a number that guides the user to a secret spice from the box. The user then places the poked pattern card over their favorite hot coffee or tea, and gently sprinkles the secret spice over it, thus serendipitously finds the spice and the punched pattern. The user can then enjoy their coffee featuring a visually appealing and aromatic latte art. We present a descriptive account on how we brought Stardust into being and contribute ideas for integrating art based multisensory experiences in mundane activities.

The increased availability of immersive headsets in the games industry has promoted wide adoption of immersive technology amongst consumers. The benefits of spatial freedom and agency for body movements in virtual reality pave the way for everyday fitness and physical training applications. We conducted a systematic review through ACM Digital Library, IEEEXplore, and Scopus, to investigate how immersive technologies have been applied for physical training in fitness and sports. Our review included all peer-reviewed papers, published and written in English, discussing all forms of hardware for VR, AR, and MR technologies, targeted towards healthy population. We excluded applications for clinical populations and treatment of specific diseases, and all non-peer reviewed articles like position papers, workshops, tutorials, and magazine columns. From the shortlisted 144 papers, we summarize the development trends of immersive technologies and highlight the challenges of designing immersive technologies for everyday fitness. We also provide recommendations for future work and highlight the need to support better collaboration with industry partners, trainer-trainee experiences, and social dynamics of sports for designing better experiences.

The fast-paced lifestyle and the conveniences of urban food storage contribute to an increase in domestic food waste, wherein we end up not consuming everything that we buy. This issue has been tackled within HCI through different awareness tools; however, the design of domestic food storage in itself has received limited attention from designers. We present FoodChestra, a smart open pantry that displays perishable food items in shared households. FoodChestra supports multimodal interactions and offers timely feedback to help users understand and reflect on their shared shopping and eating practices. In this pictorial, we present the key design decisions that were undertaken to develop the five main components of FoodChestra. Through this work, we aim to inspire new design thinking for reimagining the food storage systems of urban households that can encourage people to reflect on their food consumption practices.

Our eating practices are increasingly overshadowed by the presence of screen-based media technologies that conflict with the ideologies of mindful eating. However, little is known about whether and how screens influence our eating behaviors. To contribute to this understanding, we present a rich account of dining practices of ten participants with and without screen. Our study revealed that eating with screens was found more enjoyable than eating alone. Screens can influence one's awareness of hunger and other behaviors like chewing rate and food gaze, whereas screen-media did not trigger any judgements for food. Drawing on the study insights, we highlight the role of technology to support bodily awareness, savoring, a non-judgmental attitude to eating and on rethinking distractions as companions. The outlined considerations encourage a creative yet careful take on making mindful eating more accessible within the realities of screen-based dining cultures.

This pictorial unpacks the prototyping journey of Digestive Tumble - a tangible system that demonstrates the processes involved in the human digestive system. The system aims to support awareness of our digestive processes and help users to make informed decisions about their dietary choices. Digestive Tumble consists of nine modules, where the modules visualise a unique stage of the digestion. The system represents the digestion of five major food groups: grains, meat, vegetables, fruits and dairy through colourful tokens. Users interact with the system by inserting tokens representing their meal. These tokens transform into colourful beads, which then traverse through different modules to show the digestion of the given meal. We reflect upon the steps involved in visualising an internal bodily process through a tangible system. We hope that our design reflection will inspire future systems on visualising other internal bodily processes to support body learning through everyday reflection.

This research aims to support positive wellbeing by encouraging people to take regular microbreaks from continuous on-screen work. We present Zenscape, an innovative tangible system that offers subtle reminders to engage in non-work related creative micro activities, through the stirring water action and sound. Zenscape integrates the ideologies of the Zen garden philosophy in its design and features a mini Zen garden consisting of sand and stones, and a water cup with a stirrer, all offering multiple micro activities for the user to get an escape from their work. Unlike time management apps, we do not target productivity, but rather focus on making the most of the microbreaks. We present a descriptive account of how we brought Zenscape into being through a conceptual framing of Diversion, Destination, Play and Return. We hope that our design reflections will inspire future systems on microbreaks beyond reminder and notification systems.

Software change prediction (SCP) is the process of identifying change-prone software classes using various structural and quality metrics by developing predictive techniques. The previous studies done in this field strongly confer the correlation between the quality of metrics and the performance of such SCP models. Past SCP studies have also applied different feature reduction (FR) techniques to address issues of high dimensionality, feature irrelevance, and feature repetition. Due to the vast variety of metric suites and FR techniques applied in SCP, there is a need to analyze and compare them. It will help in identifying the most crucial features and the most effective FR techniques. So, in this research, we conduct experiments to compare and contrast 60 Object-Oriented plus 26 Graph-based metrics and 11 state-of-the-art FR techniques previously employed for SCP over a range of 6 Java projects and 3 diverse classifiers. The AUC-ROC measures and statistical tests over experimental SCP models indicate that FR techniques are effective in SCP. Also, there exist significant differences in the performance of the different FR techniques. Furthermore, from this extensive experimentation, we were able to identify a set of the most effective FR techniques and the most crucial metrics which can be used to build effective SCP models.

This paper presents a novel board game called Life on Wings, designed to create an experience and awareness about the life of birds in an urban landscape. The game lets users experience the life of six tropical urban birds across three seasons of a year. By performing different activities of birds, players learn about the challenges that an ever-changing urban environment creates for bird species. We reflect on our design process and describe the key design decisions that led to the development of our game. We also present insights of a playtesting session that was conducted with 11 participants to evaluate the design aspects of the game. Based on the study insights we present three implications on collaboration over competition, local game movement and longitudinal first-person perspective. Through this work, we aim to inspire more playful explorations on human-wildlife cohabitation.

In this pictorial, we unfold and reflect on the design process behind the creation of a research product - SWAN. SWAN is an augmented spoon that encourages people to pay more attention to their food and urges them to eat mindfully. With SWAN, our aim is to address the increasing tensions between the lucrative appeal of screen-based media and ideologies of mindful eating. We present a descriptive account on how we brought SWAN into being. In attending to key design decisions across our design process, we unveil ideas and challenges in creating a domestic research product to support everyday mindful eating.

Wearable technologies offer potential in supporting assessment of lower limb movements in video consultations, which otherwise are challenging to assess. Yet there remains a limited understanding of how such technologies can be used to improve video consultations in a hospital setting and how they contribute to the clinician-patient interactions over a distance. In this article, we report on the findings of the field evaluation of a wearable technology— SoPhy. SoPhy consists of a pair of sensor embedded socks that capture the lower limb movements of a patient and a web-interface to visualise these movements for the remote physiotherapist. Our study demonstrates that SoPhy helped the physiotherapist in identifying the subtle differences in patients’ movements across all six phases of a consultation. SoPhy increased the confidence of the physiotherapist and guided more accurate assessment of the patients. SoPhy visualisation enhanced the overall clinician-patient communication and offered a better understanding of the therapy goals to the patients. Using the characteristics of the visualisations, patients were able to plan specific goals. We discuss how SoPhy helped in addressing challenges in video consultations experienced by a physiotherapist, and beyond that, how it enabled collective reflection between therapist and patient.

Physiotherapists are increasingly using video conferencing tools for their teleconsultations. Yet, the assessment of subtle differences in body movements remains a challenge. To support lower limb assessment in video consultations, we present SoPhy, a wearable technology consisting of a pair of socks with embedded sensors for patients to wear; and a web interface that displays information about range of weight distribution, foot movement, and foot orientation for physiotherapists in real-time. We conducted a laboratory study of 40 video consultations, in which postgraduate physiotherapy students assessed lower limb function. We compare assessment with and without SoPhy. Findings show that SoPhy increased the confidence in assessing squats exercise and fewer repetitions were required to assess patients when using SoPhy. We discuss the significance of SoPhy to address the challenges of assessing bodily information over video, and present considerations for its integration with clinical practices and tools.

Self-monitoring offers benefits in facilitating awareness about physical exercise, but such data-centric activity may not always lead to an enjoyable experience. We introduce EdiPulse a novel system that creates activity treats to offer playful reflections on everyday physical activity through the appealing medium of chocolate. EdiPulse translates self-monitored data from physical activity into small 3D printed chocolate treats. These treats (< 20 grams of chocolate in total) embody four forms: Graph, Flower, Slogan and Emoji. We deployed our system across 7 households and studied its use with 13 participants for 2 weeks per household. The field study revealed positive aspects of our approach along with some open challenges, which we disseminate across five themes: Reflection, Positivity, Determination, Affection, and Co-experience. We conclude by highlighting key implications of our work for future playful food-based technology design in supporting the experience of being physically active

This paper investigates the challenges of bodily communication during video-based clinical consultations. While previous works describe the lack of eye contact and gestures over video, it is unclear how these limitations impact the course of a clinical consultation, particularly in a domain like physiotherapy where the focus is on improving body movements and functioning. To contribute to this understanding, we conducted observations of 10 naturally occurring video and face-to-face consultations for physiotherapy. We found that clinicians rely on a variety of incidental bodily cues and fine-details of body movements to assess and examine the patient. These bodily cues were noticeable during face-to-face consultations; however, a variety of bodily cues got missed over video. Consequently, video consultations became conversational where the clinicians used verbal conduct to get a fair understanding of the patient's health. To guide design of future video consultation systems, we reflect on our understanding as 4 design sensitivities: Visual Acuity, Field-of-view, Clinical Asymmetries, and Time Sequence.

In this paper, we introduce palatable representations that besides improving the understanding of physical activity through abstract visualization also provide an appetizing drink to celebrate the experience of being physically active. By designing such palatable representations, our aim is to offer novel opportunities for reflection on one's physical activities. We present TastyBeats, a fountain-based interactive system that creates a fluidic spectacle of mixing sport drinks based on heart rate data of physical activity, which the user can later consume to replenish the loss of body fluids due to the physical activity. We articulate our experiences in designing the system as well as learning gained through field deployments of the system in participants' homes for a period of two weeks. We found that our system increased participants' awareness of physical activity and facilitated a shared social experience, while the prepared drink was treated as a hedonic reward that motivated participants to exercise more. Ultimately, with this work, we aim to inspire and guide design thinking on palatable representations, which we believe opens up new interaction possibilities to support physical activity experience.