Deploying novel technologies requires the coordinated efforts of the research team, research participants, and a variety of community members and project stakeholders. To ensure that the project is completed successfully, these disparate groups of people engage in articulation work, which is the meta-work that supports the use of collaborative systems. In this paper, we examine the articulation work surrounding the deployment of systems that have found limited long-term adoption: assistive technology. Specifically, we examine three research deployments of a collaborative game for children with autism. Analysis of the articulation work performed during these studies demonstrates how research deployments of technologies create conditions in which stakeholders must take on additional roles to make the deployment work. By understanding the articulation work surrounding deployment studies engendered in this role fluidity, we can improve both research design and the analysis of data emergent from these studies.

Hearing aids and cochlear implants can improve accessibility and quality of life for people with hearing impairments. However, use of these devices may cause concern amongst some users due to sociocultural issues such as unwanted attention and perceived stigma. While some individuals may respond to these concerns by attempting to conceal their devices, or even abandoning their devices, others have responded by making their devices more visible through aesthetic customization, and some have begun to share these customizations online. In this paper, we describe community interactions in an online forum dedicated to customized hearing aids and cochlear implants. We found that community members discussed customization tools and techniques, shared their customizations, and provided each other with encouragement and support. Community members customized their devices as a means of self-expression that demonstrated the wearer's fashion sense, revealed favorite sports teams and characters, and marked holidays and personal milestones. Our findings may inform the design of assistive technologies that better support personalization, customization, and self-expression.

Wearable computing devices offer new possibilities to increase accessibility and independence for individuals with disabilities. However, the adoption of such devices may be influenced by social factors, and useful devices may not be adopted if they are considered inappropriate to use. While public policy may adapt to support accommodations for assistive technology, emerging technologies may be unfamiliar or unaccepted by bystanders. We surveyed 1200 individuals about the use of a head-mounted display in a public setting, examining how information about the user's disability affected judgments of the social acceptability of the scenario. Our findings reveal that observers considered head-mounted display use more socially acceptable if the device was being used to support a person with a disability.

While several sensing modalities and transduction approaches have been developed for tactile sensing in robotic skins, there has been much less work towards extracting features for or identifying high-level gestures performed on the skin. In this paper, we investigate using deep neural networks with hidden Markov models (DNN-HMMs), geometric moments and gesture level features to identify a set of gestures performed on robotic skins. We demonstrate that these features are useful for identifying gestures, and predict a set of gestures from a 14-class dataset with 56% accuracy, and a 7-class dataset with 71% accuracy.

Recently, workplace settings are reflecting a shift from traditional work-oriented values to promoting work/life balance and employee well-being. Technology has the ability to contribute to workplace enjoyment through the incorporation of employee activities and health-centric initiatives. Furthermore, tangible computing and interactive media can be used to explore novel interaction methods for positive user-computer experiences. We leverage these concepts to inform the development of a playful and engaging interactive installation aimed at promoting health-oriented experiences in the workplace. In this work, we detail our initial steps and design decisions to address this objective. The result is Wall Relief, a Tai Chi-inspired interactive wall unit developed to create an engaging, ephemeral experience that guides the user through a series of upper-body movements.

Assistive technology (AT) has the ability to improve the standard of living of those with disabilities, however, it can often be abandoned for aesthetic or stigmatizing reasons. Garment-based AT offers novel opportunities to address these issues as it can stay with the user to continuously monitor and convey relevant information, is non-invasive, and can provide aesthetically pleasing alternatives. In an effort to overcome traditional AT and wearable computing challenges including, cumbersome hardware constraints and social acceptability, we present Flutter, a fashion-oriented wearable AT. Flutter seamlessly embeds low-profile networked sensing, computation, and actuation to facilitate sensory augmentation for those with hearing loss. The miniaturized distributed hardware enables both textile integration and new methods to pair fashion with function, as embellishments are functionally leveraged to complement technology integration. Finally, we discuss future applications and broader implications of using such computationally-enabled textile wearables to support sensory augmentation beyond the realm of AT.

We present "Lightwear", a series of garment-based, lightweight, light-emitting wearables designed to administer light therapy for on-the-go treatment of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). Bright Light Therapy (BLT) has been used to treat SAD for more than 25 years. While light boxes continue to serve as the predominant method of treatment, it often requires a user to sit at a dedicated location for a sustained period of time (30-60 minutes), rendering therapy inconvenient and resulting in unsatisfactory compliance rates. To date, there have been few successful products developed for wearability and portability to ease the uncomfortable nature of light box treatment. However, new low-profile, light-emitting sources yield opportunities for less cumbersome textile integration and wearability. We explore the integration of light into textile substrates that focus on fashion-forward wearables which can, in turn, address BLT efficacy, usability, and convenience.

We present a wearable sensory display for visualizing knee rehabilitation as part of an in-home physical therapy program. Currently, patients undergoing knee rehabilitation have limited ways of assessing exercise form and extent of movement at home. To address this issue, we developed an exploratory wearable electronic prototype to visualize knee bend. We evaluated the device with physical therapy patients to get feedback on the design and to help us understand some of the challenges they face. We discovered that our current design is better suited for patients recovering from surgery as opposed to patients with chronic conditions.

We present our findings from the Electronic Textile Interface Swatch Book Workshops. The workshops were designed as the first in a series of collaborative design experiences that introduce small groups of faculty/students teams from particular design disciplines to the concept of electronic textile interfaces (ETIs) through the use of a textile interface “swatch book” with the support of technician/facilitators. The work here focuses on the experience of the working relationship between the designer participants and the more technologically oriented facilitators, rather than on how much the participants learned about technology. The contribution of this work is a an exploration into understanding how through the use of technology we can bridge the gap between the distant discipline expertise needed to work on projects like ETIs.

This paper describes pilot tests of a prototype device for 3-dimensional input called the UCube; briefly, this device permits spatial input to be conveyed "by hand", by turning on (or off) elements of a volumetric array of lights whose positions are then sent to a desktop computer. The purpose of the UCube is to allow users--especially students and novices with little experience of 3D design--to create a wide variety of three-dimensional shapes without the need for complex modeling software. In this paper, we describe tests of the UCube with middle-school students, focusing on the ability of students to visualize and model solid forms employing the device. We use the results of these pilot tests to ground a wider-ranging discussion of (a) how the device itself might be further developed, and (b) more general issues in designing systems for interactive three-dimensional input and fabrication.

Horse therapy is becoming an increasingly popular physical therapy activity for individuals with social, communication, or cognitive impairments as a means to help enhance social and interpersonal skills [1]. However, horse therapy and other very physically engaging therapies pose a challenge for those who rely on a communication board to communicate as the highly unstable nature of such activities impedes device operation. In such an instance, users are typically forced to abandon their communication board [2], rendering them unable to convey vital pieces of information throughout the duration of the physical therapy activity. This poster presents the Electronic-Textile (E-Textile) Wearable Communication Board - a device that was developed specifically to fill this void and support the communication needs of individuals with autism during horse therapy.