While HCI scholarship has investigated how Muslim women navigate their menstruation experiences, there remains a limited understanding of how early menstrual education is sought and shaped by religious upbringing, rulings, and values. Drawing on empirical data from the Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) method, we investigate how 14 menstruating cisgender Muslim adults in the US constructed and navigated their understanding of menstrual education. Using menarche (first menstruation) as a probe, we unpack the information they received, the gaps that persisted, and the influence of religious upbringing and narratives on their learning. We found that Muslim women gradually refine their early knowledge of menstruation and rely on social and religious support networks to navigate its implications within religious practice. Building on these insights, we present design implications and opportunities to foster menarche education and contribute to the development of robust, supportive, and religiously aligned menstrual information ecosystems.

Personal Informatics (PI) tools are crucial in helping individuals monitor their physical health, mental health, and overall well-being. Many Muslim women use multiple PI tools to support their religious and spiritual well-being alongside their health. We investigate the religious and health-tracking practices of Muslim women living in the United States during the month of Ramadan. We conducted a month-long diary study and semi-structured interviews with nine (9) Muslim women observing Ramadan. Through this research, we uncover their motivations for tracking, discover the complex interplay between their social roles and religious practices, and identify conflicts arising from competing objectives (tracking their spiritual and physical health). Our findings contribute insights into the inclusive design of Personal Informatics tools tailored to the needs of Muslim women of faith and provide a call to the research community to expand tracking technologies to include aspects that support religious health and wellness. We discuss design considerations for supporting Muslim women during Ramadan and beyond.

The widespread adoption of menstrual tracking applications has garnered much attention with recent research focusing on inclusive design. However, existing literature has yet to explore the impact of religious practices on menstrual tracking behavior. We investigate the menstrual tracking practices of Muslim women of faith in the United States, a population whose personal reproductive health behaviors are deeply influenced by their faith, values, and religious laws We conducted a three-phase study consisting of preliminary surveys (N=133), semi-structured interviews (N=20), and a post-Roe v. Wade survey (N=77). We highlight motivations for tracking and uncover this overlooked population’s challenges as they engage with menstrual tracking technologies. We reveal an intimate connection between menstrual tracking and religious practices. We uncover challenges from engaging with existing menstrual tracking applications and contribute design recommendations for accommodating faith in the design of health tracking technologies. We amplify a call to action for the HCI community to reduce the "othering" of under-represented populations and to better support the inclusive design of technologies that center religious identities and values for individuals of faith.

In the last decade, interest in accessible and eyes-free text entry has continued to grow. However, little research has been done to explore the feasibility of using audibly distinct phrases for text entry tasks. To better understand whether preexisting phrases used in text entry research are sufficiently distinct for eyes-free text entry tasks, we used Microsoft’s and Apple’s desktop text-to-speech systems to generate all 500 phrases from MacKenzie and Soukoreff’s set [32] using the default male and female voices. We then asked 392 participants recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to transcribe the generated audio clips. We report participant transcription errors and present the 96 phrases that were observed with no comprehension errors. These phrases were further tested with 80 participants who identified as low-vision and/or blind recruited through Twitter. We contribute the 92 phrases that were observed to maintain no comprehension errors across both experiments.

Individuals and communities around the world are increasingly exposed to extreme heat as a result of climate change. Urban residents are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat due to the urban heat island effect. However, understanding an individual’s heat exposure and risk is difficult to assess due to variations in temperature within an urban environment. In this paper, we examine the potential for wearable temperature sensors to accurately measure personal heat exposure. We synthesize literature from fields spanning urban planning to public health and present the results of a user study validating a set of four commonly used off-the-shelf temperature sensors in two different urban settings across five on-body locations. Our investigation found that wearable temperature sensors are less reliable in highly urban areas and when worn in direct sunlight. We discuss important design considerations for wearable temperature sensors and identify actionable ways to improve future studies.

The use of integrative medicine (IM) practices during pregnancy are on the rise in the United States and a growing number of individuals seek pregnancy support outside of the conventional medical system every year. There is a variety of integrative medicine providers (IMPs) who work outside the clinical system to fill the gaps in pregnancy support by providing a set of services such as midwifery, doula care, childbirth education, and lactation support. Evidence suggests integrative medicine providers positively impact pregnancy experiences, yet IMPs are often marginalized and excluded from the conventional pregnancy healthcare system. We present results from an ongoing investigation that seeks to understand the roles IMPs play in pregnancy healthcare journeys, and the pregnancy ecology. We interviewed 12 integrative medicine providers to understand their needs and challenges concerning technology, business models, and communication practices. Our findings reflect on a broad range of topics including the intersection of personal and professional journeys, legitimacy within the healthcare system, and the provision of personalized care. We discuss the potential for technology to support IMPs and present implications for the design of future pregnancy support technologies. Improving collaborative care and communication technologies for the IM community has the potential to improve professional experiences and the quality of care provided by IMPs. WARNING: This paper includes detailed personal narratives of individuals' pregnancy healthcare journey including information about, pregnancy, labor, delivery, birth stories, and pregnancy loss.

We present Craftec, an extendable toolkit system focused on engaging older adults in maker technology by supporting their use of common crafting skills. Craftec is comprised of LilyPad Arduino-based toolkits to promote easier crafting with hard and soft mediums. We describe the system's design, a pilot test with 8 students, and 2 two-hour single session workshop evaluations by 17 older adults. We found Craftec facilitated the efficient integration of circuits within crafted items, including fewer short circuits as compared to a basic LilyPad Arduino kit. We discuss insights into creating an older adult toolkit focused on building and prototyping rather than facilitating STEM education.

The experience of grief and death is an inevitable part of life. Grief, a natural response to death, can be a challenging and emotionally taxing journey. Bereaved individuals often feel lost in a fog, unaware of resources available to them and unsure of which resources could be useful for supporting their healing process. Complicated grief, a more intense form of grief that extends beyond six months following the death of a loved one, presents both a unique challenge and a design opportunity for the HCI community. In this work, we present the results of a survey and interview study on the technological practices of complicated grievers. Based on themes found in the data, we propose a new model for complicated grief in the digital age, consisting of the following phases: Fog, Isolation, Exploration, Immersion, and Stabilization. We then present a set of design considerations for designers seeking to create tools for complicated grievers navigating their unique grief journeys.

As technologies such as personal health records and symptom trackers become more common, we are seeing an increase in patients actively engaging in health tracking behaviors. Patient collected data can provide valuable insight for healthcare providers, particularly in the area of breast cancer. Thus far, little work has examined whether the health information that patients are willing to track and share aligns with the information needs of healthcare providers. Our work provides a comparison between the health information sharing preferences of breast cancer patients, doctors and navigators. We identify discrepancies between stakeholders' preferences, such as patients' hesitation to share feelings of loneliness, signifying where technology can play an important role in helping patients prioritize the health information shared with providers. We present design implications from this work to guide the development of future health information sharing tools that consider the differing needs of healthcare stakeholders.

Personal health-tracking technologies have become a part of mainstream culture. Their growing popularity and widespread adoption present an opportunity for the design of new interventions to improve wellness and health. However, there is an increasing concern that these technologies are failing to inspire long-term adoption. In order to understand why users abandon personal health-tracking technologies, we analyzed advertisements of secondary sales of such technologies on Craigslist. We conducted iterative inductive and deductive analyses of approximately 1600 advertisements of personal health-tracking technologies posted over the course of one month across the US. We identify health motivations and rationales for abandonment and present a set of design implications. We call for improved theories that help translate between existing theories designed to explain psychological effects of health behavior change and the technologies that help people make those changes.

Health information management for cancer care is a challenging and personal process that changes over time based on one's needs, goals, and health status. While technologies supporting health information management appear promising, we do not fully understand how health information tools fit into patients? daily lives. To better understand the opportunities and usage barriers of these tools, we designed and deployed a mobile, tablet-based health management aid: My Journey Compass. After one month of use, we interviewed twelve breast cancer patients to investigate their initial patterns of adoption, adaptation, use and non-use. We found that developing a tool that was customizable, mobile, and integrated into the patients' healthcare system resulted in a set of surprising uses by breast cancer patients for a wide variety of tasks. Our study demonstrates the potential for health management tools to improve the cancer care experience and for HCI research to influence existing healthcare systems.

Cancer navigation programs help patients overcome emotional, financial, and logistical challenges not typically addressed by the medical system. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of a rural cancer navigation organization, specifically detailing the roles collaboration and technology play in supporting navigation work. Examining navigation from a CSCW perspective, we see that navigation is a collaborative care system requiring coordination with patients, providers, and other navigators. Our study reveals a number of design opportunities for supporting navigation in the areas of resource monitoring, knowledge transfer, case management, long term navigation, and development of best practices. Supporting cancer navigation will be a critical step towards improving the healthcare experience for cancer patients.

Interacting with mobile technology while in-motion has become a daily activity for many of us. Common sense leads one to believe that texting with a mini-qwerty keyboard while mobile can be dangerous since users are distracted and not paying attention to the environment. Previous studies have found that mobility negatively impacts text entry performance for novice participants typing on virtual keyboards on touch screen mobile phones. We investigate the impact of mobility on expert users' ability to quickly and accurately input text on mobile phones equipped with fixed-key mini-qwerty keyboards. In total, 36 participants completed 600 minutes of typing on mini-qwerty keyboards (300 minutes training up to expertise) in three mobility conditions (seated, standing, and walking) generating almost 4,000,000 characters across all conditions. Surprisingly, we found that walking has a significant impact on expert typing speeds but does not significantly impact expert accuracy rates.

We present the evaluation of BrailleTouch, an accessible keyboard for blind users on touchscreen smartphones. Based on the standard Perkins Brailler, BrailleTouch implements a six-key chorded braille soft keyboard. Eleven blind participants typed for 165 twenty-minute sessions on three mobile devices: 1) BrailleTouch on a smartphone; 2) a soft braille keyboard on a touchscreen tablet; and 3) a commercial braille keyboard with physical keys. Expert blind users averaged 23.2 words per minute (wpm) on the BrailleTouch smartphone. The fastest participant, a touchscreen novice, achieved 32.1 wpm during his first session. Overall, participants were able to transfer their existing braille typing skills to a touchscreen device within an hour of practice. We report the speed for braille text entry on three mobile devices, an in depth error analysis, and the lessons learned for the design and evaluation of accessible and eyes-free soft keyboards.

The use of small display devices is becoming more prevalent in our daily lives, such as smart phones, ultramobile PCs, and even head-mounted displays. Usually, the graphical user interface components shown on these displays are small and often difficult to interact with. Although some prior work has shown that Fitts' law does not hold for small target size, a detailed investigation of Fitts' law in different small target size conditions has yet to be done. In this study we conducted two experiments investigating the impact of small target sizes on pointing performance. We identified a critical point on the target size dimension where Fitts' law started to break down. We then proposed a small target size index of difficulty and an empirical Fitts' formula to extend the Fitts' law beyond the critical point to small target size conditions. Our results show that the new model works well as both a descriptive and a predictive model for small target size conditions.

With the proliferation of mobile devices it has become common to see groups of users working or playing together using multiple mobile devices. While much effort is exerted to ensure that interaction with a mobile device is useful for each individual user, less effort has gone into considering how to design and evaluate mobile interfaces and platforms for group use. Recent improvements in the interaction, computing, connectivity and general flexibility of mobile devices make them an ideal, yet underutilized, platform for group level interaction. Our goal with this workshop is to bring together researchers who have started to investigate the collocated group use of mobile devices and to shed light on the challenges of designing and evaluating mobile collocated group experiences.

International and intercultural collaborations provide a unique opportunity to explore cultural differences in the usage and appropriation of a technology. Mobile photo capture and sharing has been growing in popularity in the Western world but nowhere has the practice been as eagerly adopted as in South Korea. In this paper we present an evaluation of a mobile-collocated photo sharing technology probe designed to determine the ways in which photo capture and sharing can effect and enhance face-to-face interaction for pre-existing social groups. We explore the interaction of culture and automatic, real-time photo capture and sharing on groups of friends engaging in a walking tour. We assemble a multicultural research team to better understand our observations and isolate cultural and technological artifacts. We relate our findings to prior work in the area to show that culture can have as much, if not more, impact on group usage of a technology than the technical capabilities of a system.

When designing a text entry system for mobile phone keypads, a designer needs to overcome the ambiguity that arises from mapping the 26 letters of the roman alphabet to only 12 keys (0--9, *, #). In this paper, we present a novel two-thumb chording system for text entry on a standard 12-key mobile phone keypad and introduce a performance model based on Fitts' Law for an expert user. The model provides a behavioral description of the user and predicts a text entry rate of 55.02 wpm.

We investigate the effect of placement and user mobility on the time required to access an on-body interface. In our study, a wrist-mounted system was significantly faster to access than a device stored in the pocket or mounted on the hip. In the latter two conditions, 78% of the time it took to access the device was spent retrieving the device from its holder. As mobile devices are beginning to include peripherals (for example, Bluetooth headsets and watches connected to a mobile phone stored in the pocket), these results may help guide interface designers with respect to distributing functions across the body between peripherals.

By analyzing features of users' typing, Automatic Whiteout++ detects and corrects up to 32.37% of the errors made by typists while using a mini-QWERTY (RIM Blackberry style) keyboard. The system targets "off-by-one" errors where the user accidentally presses a key adjacent to the one intended. Using a database of typing from longitudinal tests on two different keyboards in a variety of contexts, we show that the system generalizes well across users, model of keyboard, user expertise, and keyboard visibility conditions. Since a goal of Automatic Whiteout++ is to embed it in the firmware of mini-QWERTY keyboards, it does not rely on a dictionary. This feature enables the system to correct errors mid-word instead of applying a correction after the word has been typed. Though we do not use a dictionary, we do examine the effect of varying levels of language context in the system's ability to detect and correct erroneous keypresses.

People use photographs for numerous reasons with one of the most common uses of both analog and digital photographs is as an artifact to share and discuss with others. While the practice of photo sharing has been thoroughly examined in the HCI community, there is currently very little research on easily capturing and sharing content within groups of collocated mobile users. In this paper we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a mobile photo sharing application, Mobiphos, that gives a group of collocated users the ability to capture and simultaneously share photos in real-time with each other.

MacKenzie and Soukoreff have previously introduced a Fitts' Law-based performance model of expert two-thumb text entry on mini-QWERTY keyboards [4]. In this work we validate the original model using results from a longitudinal study of mini-QWERTY keyboards, and update the model to account for observed inter-key time data.