Monitoring patients’ pain is essential in clinical contexts, particularly post-surgery. However, collecting pain data is time-consuming and relies on manual data capture by clinical staff. Few studies assess the efficacy of pain-logging technology in a long-term, ecologically valid manner. We report on a 6-year deployment of a minimalist pain-logging device, the PainPad, in post-surgery orthopaedic wards in a large UK hospital. Our data show that patients (n > 500) tend to submit more pain scores that are at a higher rating compared to nurse-collected data. Interviews with the nursing staff using the device highlight the importance of understanding the complexities of the context of use when trying to integrate novel technology into clinical practice. Finally, we contribute reflections on the lessons learnt from running a significant long-term deployment of a prototype health technology in a naturalistic setting.

Loneliness is a growing public health concern, particularly among older adults, and has been linked to adverse physical and mental health outcomes. This study presents a machine learning approach to predict levels of loneliness using behavioural and emotional data collected from 124 participants through a mobile phone application over a 71-day period. The dataset includes 27 features derived from self-logged information such as wellbeing scores, mood fluctuations, and time spent in various home locations. Feature selection was applied to identify the most discriminative indicators, with classification and regression models evaluated using both Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Random Forest (RF). We applied feature selection to identify the most discriminative indicators and evaluated both Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) models for classification and regression. The highest classification accuracy—69.19% on a 7-point loneliness scale—was achieved using a five-fold SVM with the top 13 features. In the regression task, the best performance was observed using 26 features, resulting in a minimum Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.6752. These findings indicate that a selected subset of behavioural and emotional features can offer a meaningful estimation of loneliness levels. This has potential to inform the design of real-time, personalised digital tools aimed at identifying and supporting individuals at risk of loneliness.

Pain is an essential indicator of health and guides clinical treatments. Logging pain is important in supporting this. However, there is little research into pre-adolescent children's pain logging tools. Utilising the Bluebells method to engage children as co-designers, we gathered children's perspectives on pain-logging tools; in the first workshop by using tangible design approaches to support creative thinking, and in the second workshop by discussing developed prototypes based on the children's designs. Our findings highlight design concepts that the research team – despite many years of pain-related research – had not considered in the context of paediatric logging, namely a) prioritizing children's privacy in social settings while using pain-logging tools; b) emphasizing personalization to boost engagement; and c) logging general well-being of children alongside pain intensity to collect more insightful data. These findings thus demonstrate the value of co-designing pain-logging technologies with children.

There are many design techniques to support the co-design of tangible technologies. However, few of these design methods allow the involvement of users at scale and across diverse geographic locations. While popular in psychology, the story completion method (SCM) has only recently started to be adopted within the HCI community. We explore whether SCM can generate meaningful design insights from large, diverse study populations for the design of Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs). Based on the results of two questionnaire studies using SCM, we conclude that the method can be used to generate meaningful design insights. Drawing on a systematic review of 870 TUI papers, we then contextualise the strengths and weaknesses of SCM against commonly used design methods, before reflecting on our experience of using the method across two distinct domains. We discuss the advantages of the method (particularly in terms of the scale and diversity of participation) and the challenges (particularly around constructing meaningful story stems, and developing the correct level of scaffolding to support creativity). We conclude that SCM is particularly suitable to be used in the early stages of the design process to understand the socio-cultural context of deployment.

Self-tracking technology can help users develop new knowledge about themselves, supporting their health and general wellbeing. Most of these devices inform users about their lives by autonomously generating data about highly constrained topics. Recent research has started to explore more flexible, manual self-tracking systems, which allow users to express themselves through their data and learn by engaging with their experiences in-the-moment. This article describes a field trial using the Chromatize app, designed to explore the value of minimalism and flexibility — including in data histories — in personal tracking systems. Our data indicate that low-burden experience logging systems which focus on the creation of symbolically-rich, self-defined data can support self-awareness, reflection and regulation at opportune moments. The analysis also contributes a formulation of reflection in the context of self-tracking technologies that is more meaningful than the loose use of ‘reflection’ used in much of the literature.

Effective privacy protection in dynamic UbiComp environments requires users to be able to manage their privacy seamlessly across diverse contexts. To support this, designers need to go beyond GUI-based interactions and utilise tangible and embodied interactions. To help designers in such endeavours, we present the TTP toolkit: a card-based ideation kit to generate designs for tangible privacy management tools. The toolkit translates the Privacy Care framework for tangible-supported privacy management into a game intended to support designers in developing TUI privacy management tools. We demonstrate use of our toolkit through 10 online participatory workshops with 22 interaction designers. Our results demonstrate that the toolkit was effective in supporting the participants to creatively and collaboratively generate meaningful conceptual designs of tangible tools for privacy management.

Effective end-user privacy management in everyday ubiquitous computing environments requires giving users complex, contextual information about potential privacy breaches and enabling management of these breaches in a timely, engaging and intuitive manner. In this paper, we propose using empirically grounded image schema-based metaphors to help design these interactions. Results from our exploratory user study (N=22) demonstrate end users’ preferences for changes in physical attributes and spatial properties of objects for privacy awareness. For privacy control, end users prefer to exert force and create spatial movement. The study also explores user preferences for wearable vs. ambient form-factors for managing privacy and concludes that a hybrid solution would work for more users across more contexts. We thus provide a combination of form factor preferences, and a focused set of image schemas for designers to use when designing metaphor-based tangible privacy management tools.

The global population is ageing, leading to shifts in healthcare needs. It is well established that increased physical activity can improve the health and wellbeing of many older adults. However, motivation remains a prime concern. We report findings from a series of focus groups where we explored the concept of using community displays to promote physical activity to a local neighborhood. In doing so, we contribute both an understanding of the design space for community displays, as well as a discussion of the implications of our work for the broader CSCW community. We conclude that our work demonstrates the potential for developing community displays for increasing physical activity amongst older adults.

The emergence of ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) environments has increased the risk of undesired access to individuals’ physical space or their information, anytime and anywhere, raising potentially serious privacy concerns. Individuals lack awareness and control of the vulnerabilities in everyday contexts and need support and care in regulating disclosures to their physical and digital selves. Existing GUI-based solutions, however, often feel physically interruptive, socially disruptive, time-consuming and cumbersome. To address such challenges, we investigate the user interaction experience and discuss the need for more tangible and embodied interactions for effective and seamless natural privacy management in everyday UbiComp settings. We propose the Privacy Care interaction framework, which is rooted in the literature of privacy management and tangible computing. Keeping users at the center,AwarenessandControlare established as the core parts of our framework. This is supported with three interrelated interaction tenets:Direct, Ready-to-Hand,andContextual. Direct refers to intuitiveness through metaphor usage. Ready-to-Hand supports granularity, non-intrusiveness, and ad hoc management, through periphery-to-center style attention transitions. Contextual supports customization through modularity and configurability. Together, they aim to provide experience of an embodied privacy care with varied interactions that are calming and yet actively empowering. The framework provides designers of such care with a basis to refer to, to generate effective tangible tools for privacy management in everyday settings. Through five semi-structured focus groups, we explore the privacy challenges faced by a sample set of 15 older adults (aged 60+) across their cyber-physical-social spaces. The results show conformity to our framework, demonstrating the relevance of the facets of the framework to the design of privacy management tools in everyday UbiComp contexts.

The global population is ageing, leading to shifts in healthcare needs. Home healthcare monitoring systems currently focus on physical health, but there is an increasing recognition that psychological wellbeing also needs support. This raises the question of how to design devices that older adults can interact with to log their feelings. We designed three tangible prototypes, based on existing paper-based scales of affect. We report findings from a lab study in which participants used the prototypes to log the emotion from standardised emotional vignettes. We found that the prototypes allowed participants to accurately record identified emotions in a reasonable time. Our participants expressed a perceived need to record emotions, either to share with family/carers or for self-reflection. We conclude that our work demonstrates the potential for in-home tangible devices for recording the emotions of older adults to support wellbeing.

The world is facing an ageing population phenomenon, coupled with health and social problems, which affect older people’s ability to live independently. This situation challenges the viability of health and social services. Smart home technology can play a significant role in easing the pressure on caregivers, as well as reduce the financial costs of health and social services. Activity of Daily Living (ADL) recognition is an essential step to translate sensor data into activities at high semantic levels. Supervised Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are the most commonly used techniques for this application. However, a common problem is a lack of availability of enough annotated data to train these algorithms. Collecting annotated data is expensive, time consuming, and may violate people’s privacy. Intra- and inter-personal variation in performing complex activities is another challenge for an ML-based activity recognition approach. In this paper, a multi-layered knowledge-based architecture for recognising ADL in real-time is proposed. At the first stage, sensor data is pre-processed; events that describe changes in the environment are detected at the second stage, in which the sequence of events is used to recognise more semantically complex activities at the third stage. A new ADL ontology is proposed to model the knowledge related to the sensor platform and the targeted activities as the previously proposed ontologies were either designed to deal with specific sensor data, or they ignored the context environment information which is important in recognising complex activities.

Communication technologies for maintaining close personal relationships are often designed to be lightweight and easy to use. While these properties allow for relationships to be maintained with speed and efficiency, they may come at the expense of more effortful messages that are constructed with thought, time and care. This raises the question of how communication technologies might be designed to provoke moments of effortful maintenance from their users. To explore this question, we designed and implemented Message Builder, a text-based communication system that encourages relational partners to send increasingly long messages. We report findings from a field trial in which 14 dyads used Message Builder for everyday relational maintenance. While some of the effort-provoking features of Message Builder were described as problematic, we found that the system had value in guiding users towards authentic and meaningful effort investments that were valuable within their individual relationships.

Many Smart City projects are beginning to consider the role of citizens. However, current methods for engaging urban populations in participatory design (PD) activities are somewhat limited. In this article, we describe an approach taken to empower socially disadvantaged citizens, using a variety of both social and technological tools, in a Smart City project. Through analysing the nature of citizens’ concerns and proposed solutions, we explore the benefits of our approach, arguing that engaging citizens can uncover hyper-local concerns that provide a foundation for finding solutions to address citizen concerns. By reflecting on our approach, we identify four key challenges to utilising PD at an urban scale; balancing scale with the personal, who has control of the process, who is participating and integrating citizen-led work with local authorities. By addressing these challenges, we will be able to truly engage citizens as collaborators in co-designing their city.

The investment of effort into personal communication can be highly meaningful to people, and has particular significance for the mediation of close relationships. This paper presents qualities of effort investment that are seen to be valuable. Furthermore, we consider how these qualities might sensitise designers of communication technologies to the meaningfulness of effort. We report a qualitative study focusing on individual descriptions of meaningful effort invested into everyday correspondence. We encapsulate our findings in the form of five qualities that characterise valued effort: discretionary investment, personal craft, focused time, responsiveness to the recipient, and challenge to a sender's capacities. Drawing on ideas generated in brainstorming sessions, we present two illustrative concepts for new communication technologies, highlighting how our findings can guide the creation of designed artefacts.

Impact is embedded in today's research culture, with increasing importance being placed on the value of research to society. In interdisciplinary and cross‐sector projects, team members may hold distinct views on the types of impact they want to create. Set in the context of an interdisciplinary, cross‐sector project comprised of partners from academia, industry, and the nonprofit sector, our paper unpacks how these diverse project members understand impact. Our analysis shows that interdisciplinary projects offer a unique opportunity to create impact on a number of different levels. Moreover, it demonstrates that a lack of accountable design and collaboration practices can potentially hinder pathways to impact. Finally, we find that the interdisciplinary perspectives that such projects introduce encourage a rich gamut of sustainable outcomes that go beyond commercialization. Our findings support researchers working in these complex contexts to appreciate the opportunities and challenges involved in interdisciplinary cross‐sector research contexts while imparting them with strategies for overcoming these challenges.

The concept of gamification is receiving increasing attention, particularly for its potential to motivate students. However, to date the majority of studies in the context of education have predominantly focused on University students. This paper explores how gamification could potentially benefit a specific student population, children with dyslexia who are transitioning from primary to secondary school. Two teachers from specialist dyslexia teaching centres used classDojo, a gamification platform, during their teaching sessions for one term. We detail how the teachers appropriated the platform in different ways and how the students discussed classDojo in terms of motivation. These findings have subsequently informed a set of provisional implications for gamification distilling opportunities for future pedagogical uses, gamification design for special education and methodological approaches to how gamification is studied.

Designers of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) have long been interested in delivering personalized teaching to individual students, typically by ensuring that the student receives content appropriate to their skills and knowledge. Nonetheless, a more holistic view on what constitutes good teaching practice has challenged whether this approach to user modelling is sufficient. Teaching is not only defined by what is taught, but also by how it is taught. In this paper, we demonstrate that exploratory design research can support this view by generating a more inclusive set of user attributes for purposes of user modelling. Through a case study, we show that design research for user modelling can function as a boundary object serving three important roles that underpin more specifically the design of user modelling and more broadly ITS design. First, design research can establish common ground by encapsulating domain knowledge in an accessible form. This can support diverse project stakeholders to make decisions on what is to be modelled. Secondly, design research can reveal a wide range of teaching and learning perspectives that in turn introduce transparency to the decision-making process of user modelling and provoke a sense of criticality and accountability amongst project stakeholders. Thirdly, design research can build new bridges between the design of the technology and the user model that underpins it. To this end, user attributes deemed important, yet too complex or cumbersome to develop, can become design principles in the context of the overall ITS design. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS We highlight how the creation of user models rarely incorporates assistance from the HCI community. We present a series of design activities intended to assist in the creation of a User Model. We examine how this design-oriented methodology creates a boundary object. We discuss the three benefits this boundary object brings to constructing user models, namely establishing common ground, creating transparency when considering possible alternatives and creating a springboard for new activities.

Any interactive communication system can support personal relationships by facilitating a welcome and timely presence of an absent person in the mind of the other. This paper presents a consideration of how short-term feelings, as experienced during acts of communication, relate to a relationship's longer term feelings towards one another. Through a 21-day study with 63 participants, we report ratings of Closeness and Social Presence (SP) as evidence that links the two concepts as temporally distinct aspects of emotional connectedness. Such a relationship is useful as, by relating SP to Closeness, we can demonstrate that, by creating technologies that help to create emotionally significant experiences during acts of communication, we are supporting the relationship in a more meaningful, long-term fashion by supporting feelings of Closeness. This assists the human computer interaction (HCI) community by clarifying how SP and Closeness can be used as phenomenological concepts to assess communication devices designed to support interpersonal relationships.

Children typically have extensive expertise and experiences of computer games, which can enable them to make valuable contributions when involved in the design of games. Within this paper we discuss our approach to the involvement of children in the game design process, specifically to inform a game narrative. We describe two design workshops with children, which focused on the design of the narrative within a literacy game based on the Day of the Dead festival. We describe how the knowledge that resulted from these workshops furthered our understanding of children's storytelling schema and preferences for games as well as their approach to story creation and expression during the game design process. We also discuss how our findings informed an initial set of design principles for guiding narrative design within children's games as well as recommendations for including storytelling design activities within the technology design process.

The neurodiversity movement seeks to positively reframe certain neurological conditions, such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and dyslexia, by concentrating on their strengths. In recent years, neurodiverse children have increasingly been involved in the technology design process, but the design approaches adopted have focused mostly on overcoming difficulties of working with these children, leaving their strengths untapped. We present a new participatory design (PD) framework, Diversity for Design (D4D), which provides guidance for technology designers working with neurodiverse children in establishing PD methods that capitalize on children's strengths and also support potential difficulties. We present two case studies of use of the D4D framework, involving children with ASD and dyslexia, showing how it informed the development and refinement of PD methods tailored to these populations. In addition, we show how to apply the D4D framework to other neurodiverse populations.

The advent of Internet communication has seen much personal correspondence move from paper-based into digital form. But while the Internet is often associated with the decline in paper-based communication, it also provides opportunities to exchange traditional ephemera in new, exciting ways. We present here an analysis of Postcrossing, an online system that facilitates the sending of non-digital postcards among random strangers. Via a survey study of Postcrossing users, we elicit six key factors that contribute to the Postcrossing experience. We consider how these elements might be carried over into other digital communication technologies.

There is a growing body of work in HCI on the design of communication technologies to help support lovers in long distance relationships. We build upon this work by presenting an exploratory study of hand-holding prototypes. Our work distinguishes itself by basing distance communication metaphors on elements of familiar, simple co-located behaviours. We argue that the combined evocative power of unique co-created physical representations of the absent other can be used by separated lovers to generate powerful and positive experiences, in turn sustaining romantic connections at a distance.