A recent surge in sensing platforms for sports has been accompanied by drastic improvements in the quality of data analytics. This improved quality has catalyzed notable progress in training techniques, athletic performance tracking, real-time strategy management, and even better refereeing. However, despite a sustained growth in the number of para-athletes, there has been little exploration into the accessibility and data analytics needs for adaptive sports. We interviewed 18 participants in different roles (athletes, coaches, and high-performance managers) across six adaptive sports. We probed them on their current practices, existing challenges, and analytical needs. We uncovered common themes prevalent across all six sports and further examined findings in three groups: (1) blind sports; (2) wheelchair sports; and (3) adaptive sports with high equipment. Our study highlights the challenges faced by different adaptive sports and unearths opportunities for future research to improve accessibility and address specific needs for each sport.

In an attempt to help users reach their health goals and practitioners understand the relationship between diet and disease, researchers have proposed many wearable systems to automatically monitor food consumption. When a person consumes food, he/she brings the food close to their mouth, take a sip or bite and chew, and then swallow. Most diet monitoring approaches focus on one of these aspects of food intake, but this narrow reliance requires high precision and often fails in noisy and unconstrained situations common in a person's daily life. In this paper, we introduce FitByte, a multi-modal sensing approach on a pair of eyeglasses that tracks all phases of food intake. FitByte contains a set of inertial and optical sensors that allow it to reliably detect food intake events in noisy environments. It also has an on-board camera that opportunistically captures visuals of the food as the user consumes it. We evaluated the system in two studies with decreasing environmental constraints with 23 participants. On average, FitByte achieved 89% F1-score in detecting eating and drinking episodes.

Using a phone while driving is distracting and dangerous. It increases the accident chances by 400%. Several techniques have been proposed in the past to detect driver distraction due to phone usage. However, such techniques usually require instrumenting the user or the car with custom hardware. While detecting phone usage in the car can be done by using the phone's GPS, it is harder to identify whether the phone is used by the driver or one of the passengers. In this paper, we present a lightweight, software-only solution that uses the phone's camera to observe the car's interior geometry to distinguish phone position and orientation. We then use this information to distinguish between driver and passenger phone use. We collected data in 16 different cars with 33 different users and achieved an overall accuracy of 94% when the phone is held in hand and 92.2% when the phone is docked (1 sec. delay). With just a software upgrade, this work can enable smartphones to proactively adapt to the user's context in the car and and substantially reduce distracted driving incidents.

The hardware research and development communities have invested heavily in tools and materials that facilitate the design and prototyping of electronic devices. Numerous easy-to-access and easy-to-use tools have streamlined the prototyping of interactive and embedded devices for experts and led to a remarkable growth in non-expert builders. However, there has been little exploration of challenges associated with moving beyond a prototype and creating hundreds or thousands of exact replicas - a process that is still challenging for many. We interviewed 25 individuals with experience taking prototype hardware devices into low volume production. We systematically investigated the common issues faced and mitigation strategies adopted. We present our findings in four main categories: (1) gaps in technical knowledge; (2) gaps in non-technical knowledge; (3) minimum viable rigor in manufacturing preparation; and (4) building relationships and a professional network. Our study unearthed several opportunities for new tools and processes to support the transition beyond a working prototype to cost effective low-volume manufacturing. These would complement the aforementioned tools and materials that support design and prototyping.

Web user interfaces today leverage many common GUI design patterns, including navigation bars and menus (hierarchical structure), tabular content presentation, and scrolling. These visual-spatial cues enhance the interaction experience of sighted users. However, the linear nature of screen translation tools currently available to blind users make it difficult to understand or navigate these structures. We introduce Spatial Region Interaction Techniques (SPRITEs) for nonvisual access: a novel method for navigating two-dimensional structures using the keyboard surface. SPRITEs 1) preserve spatial layout, 2) enable bimanual interaction, and 3) improve the end user experience. We used a series of design probes to explore different methods for keyboard surface interaction. Our evaluation of SPRITEs shows that three times as many participants were able to complete spatial tasks with SPRITEs than with their preferred current technology.

Glanceability and low access time are arguably the key assets of a smartwatch. Smartwatches are designed for, and excel at micro-interactions- simple tasks that only take seconds to complete. However, if a user desires to transition to a task requiring sustained usage, we show that there are additional factors that prevent possible longer usage of the smartwatch. In this paper, we conduct a study with 18 participants to empirically demonstrate that interacting with the smartwatch on the wrist leads to fatigue after only a few minutes. In our study, users performed three tasks in two different poses while using a smartwatch. We demonstrate that only after three minutes of use, the change in perceived exertion of the user was anchored as "somewhat strong" on the Borg CR10 survey scale. These results place an upper bound for smartwatch usage that needs to be considered in application and interaction design.

Usability testing is an everyday practice for usability professionals in corporations. But, as in all experimental situations, who you study can be as important as what you study. In this Note we explore a common practice in the corporation: experimenting on the company's employees. While fellow employees can be convenient and avoid issues such as confidentiality, we use two usability studies of mobile and web applications to show that employees spend less time-on-task on competitor websites than non-employees. Non-employees reliably rate competitor websites and apps higher than employees on both usability (on the 10-question SUS scale) and ease of use (on the 1-question SEQ scale). We conclude with recommendations for best practices for usability testing in the corporation.

No abstract available.