Psychotherapy is crucial for managing cue-induced cravings. However, most research has focused on explicit drug cues that elicit intense cravings, and recreating such high-risk scenarios in practice can inadvertently heighten cravings afterward, making these approaches impractical or ethically problematic in real-world settings. To address this, we developed a cue-exposure technology probe system, VirtualCravingProbe, which integrates VR simulations with real-time biofeedback to enhance self-awareness in clinical drug psychotherapy. We conducted an exploratory study with twelve patients recovering from methamphetamine addiction using the VirtualCravingProbe system, generating design guidelines for future iterations of an integrated VR and biofeedback-assisted therapy tool. Results revealed qualitative evidence that real-time heart-rate monitoring in VR heightened patients’ awareness of triggers and their craving responses. These findings align with the CBT cognitive-triangle framework, which emphasizes the interplay of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Moreover, the system demonstrated potential to enrich patient–therapist dialogue and support the adoption of effective coping strategies.

Psychotherapy is vital for identifying and managing craving-triggering cues. In this study, we paired virtual reality (VR) drug-cue scenarios with physiological sensors to capture participants’ real-time responses. Qualitative interviews with nineteen patients and six therapists showed that contextual elements resembling past drug-use experiences reliably provoked cravings, while biofeedback data confirmed that VR effectively elicits measurable physical responses. Our findings further suggest that adjusting the completeness and fidelity of VR scenarios to match a patient’s recovery stage can manage craving intensity and prevent urges from persisting beyond each session. Therapists also see opportunities to integrate virtual reality into clinical practice to address challenges from prior sessions and enhance therapeutic outcomes. This paper offers concrete recommendations for developing clinically deployable VR scenarios and outlines implications for future research and therapeutic applications in drug treatment.

Shopping addiction is characterized by unrestrained repetitive purchasing behavior, negatively impacting one's financial stability and social welfare. This study sought to gain insights into the development of self-monitoring devices and data sharing schemes to assist in dealing with shopping addiction. In this two-phase study, the Bergen Shopping Addiction Scale was first used in the pre-study screening survey to identify individuals with a propensity toward shopping addiction. In the second phase, an online survey was conducted, comprising (1) a study introduction and consent form, (2) the main survey, and (3) follow-up demographic questions. Phase II involved 332 participants meeting this criterion and was conducted to examine behavioral tendencies, evaluate prior intervention experiences, and elicit user preferences pertaining to self-monitoring and data sharing. The majority of respondents expressed a preference for systems that facilitate the tracking of shopping behavior and enable data sharing with intimate partners. Based on these findings, we recommend three directions for the further development of support systems: 1) Reduce the burden of mood tracking; 2) Streamline mechanisms for sharing data with key support figures; and 3) Tailor intervention strategies in accordance with key addiction indicators.

Despite the role of online spaces as resources and support networks for non-binary individuals, these users encounter significant challenges in presenting and disclosing their gender identities, particularly in non-Western contexts where such practices remain understudied. To address this gap, we conducted a mixed-methods study with 12 participants, employing asynchronous remote community interactions, workshops, and interviews. Our findings reveal: 1) the impacts of technological affordances and embedded gender norms on non-binary online identities and negotiations, 2) text-based representation of non-binary users' gender identities in online spaces, and 3) self-presentation in spoken Mandarin and voice-based communication. We underscore the necessity of designing inclusive online spaces that address cross-cultural and linguistic diversity while catering to the unique needs of non-binary users' gender presentation.

Gambling addiction can have a profound impact on the mental and financial well-being of individuals and their families. This paper presents an in-depth study on the development of technologies aimed at promoting collaborative efforts between patients and family members to deal with gambling addiction. The study performed interviews with ten pairs of gambling-addicted patients with a family member, six patients without family participation, and four treatment experts. Thematic analysis was conducted from the perspectives of patients and family members with the aim of identifying key themes underlying the development of the three antecedents of Planned Behavioral Theory: attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control. In accordance with the tenets of Prospect Theory, we sought to elucidate the process of attitude formation during editing and evaluation. We also analyzed opportunities and concerns in designing technologies to address gambling addiction. The identified themes provided a basis by which to assess design implications from the perspective of Planned Behavioral Theory. Our analysis revealed three directions for future development: 1) helping patients to make informed gambling decisions through rational editing and evaluation, as suggested by Prospect Theory (attitude level); 2) promoting communication within families to enhance mutual understanding and trust (subjective norm level); and 3) helping patients to develop personal capabilities, while providing a realistic impression of their progress (perceived behavioral control level).

The research centers on examining the utilization of instant messaging (IM) in remote work interactions between supervisors and subordinates. Through a series of one-on-one in-depth interviews (n = 12), our findings unveil distinct nuances in how subordinates and supervisors perceive and engage with IM, encompassing aspects such as response strategies, interaction frequency, and interaction nature. Notably, a significant finding emerged concerning the practice of self-censorship in IM, acting as a strategy for impression management, predominantly adopted by subordinates in their interactions with supervisors. Additionally, our investigation sheds light on a contrasting viewpoint regarding the social use of IM. While supervisor participants acknowledged its potential to bolster work-related collaboration, this perspective appeared less pronounced among subordinate participants. Our study concludes by delving into the design implications for IM application design, offering insights that can shape collaborative dynamics within remote work environments.

Neurofeedback refers to the process of feeding a sensory representation of brain activity back to users in real time to improve a particular brain function, e.g., their focus and/or attention on a particular task. This study addressed the notable lack of research on methods used to visualize EEG data and their effects on the immersive quality of VR. We developed an algorithm to quantify focus, yielding a focus score. A pre-study with twenty participants confirmed its effectiveness in distinguishing between focused and relaxed mental states. Subsequently, we used this focus score to prototype a VR experience system visualizing the focus score in preconfigured manners, which was utilized in an exploratory study to assess the impact of different neurofeedback visualization methods on user engagement and focus in VR. Among all the visualization methods evaluated, the environmental scheme stood out due to its superior usability during task execution, its ability to evoke positive emotions through the visualization of objects or scenes, and its minimal deviation from user expectations. Additionally, we explored design guidelines based on collected results for future research to further refine the visualization scheme, ensuring effective integration of the focus score within the VR environment. These enhancements are crucial for designing neurofeedback visualization schemes that aim to boost participant focus in VR settings, offering significant insights into the optimization of such technologies.

Biases in Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems or their results are one important issue that demands AI explainability. Despite the prevalence of AI applications, the general public are not necessarily equipped with the ability to understand how the black-box algorithms work and how to deal with biases. To inform designs for explainable AI (XAI), we conducted in-depth interviews with major stakeholders, both end-users (n = 24) and engineers (n = 15), to investigate how they made sense of AI applications and the associated biases according to situations of high and low stakes. We discussed users’ perceptions and attributions about AI biases and their desired levels and types of explainability. We found that personal relevance and boundaries as well as the level of stake are two major dimensions for developing user trust especially during biased situations and informing XAI designs.

Depression is the most common mental health problem in older adults; however, a lack of understanding in the interaction between physical and social causes hinders effective treatment. Unique issues such as age-specific increases in comorbid physical problems and alienation from social contact can make it difficult for health providers to identify instances of depression. These also make it difficult for depressed older adults to communicate with their social resources, such as friends, family, and health providers. Integrating technology-assisted collaboration with members of patients' social network to observe and manage multi-dimensional factors in depressed older adults' states is a potential way to improve the quality of practitioners' treatment-planning around these multi-dimensional factors, as well as provide assistance for family and friends' involvement in managing the depression. We conducted an interview study on stakeholders' perceptions of depression and communication to understand the opportunities and challenges involved in implementing such collaborative design. Interviewees included 16 depressed older adult patients, 10 of their family members, and two psychiatrists. Our findings reveal new insights into 1) patients' and families' social values and understandings of patients' condition, as well as 2) how these values and understandings influenced decision-making on communicating with each other and acting on depression. These insights have implications for the consideration of information and communication systems to aid depressed older adults' recovery and engagement with social network members.

Drug addiction is a chronic condition, marked by compulsive drug use. In previous research, cue exposure and biofeedback technologies proved effective in drug psychotherapy sessions; however, the focus has generally been on the awareness of cravings and the identification of cues. There has been relatively little research on methods aimed at facilitating therapist-patient communication, particularly from a user-centered perspective. In this paper, we describe a qualitative technology probe study exploring the means by which patients identify cues and perceive cravings as well as the way that they communicate with therapists. Our analysis considers the difficulties in cue identification and craving perception, the interactions between the two, and the means by which these characteristics could impact the design of VR support systems in the future.

Collaboration comes in many forms. How relevant stakeholders collaborate at the scale of a system deserves scholarly attention because their practices may differ from traditional teams like dyads or small groups. This study investigates how stakeholders of a local produce supply-and-demand system, namely experts, farmers, sellers, and consumers, in Taiwan collaborate and communicate for information as a case to illustrate how they depend on one another for information collaboration in the system. Using qualitative in-depth interview, we found that stakeholders had diverse collaboration goals within the system and encountered challenges in acquiring information from one another. In addition to establishing a holistic understanding of stakeholders' individual and collective practices in the system of produce supply-and-demand, we propose several design suggestions to address the needs and challenges we identified.

Sexual health is an important domain that deserves more HCI attention, such as supporting the practices of men who have sex with men (MSM) against HIV risks. One current clinical approach to addressing this issue is to use preventive medicine like pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). As medication adherence of PrEP is challenging that involves users' individual knowledge, sex practices, relational status, and community support, technological mediation benefits from a human-centered perspective that goes beyond individual-level support to understand MSM's needs so as to design a holistic technological intervention for them. With an in-depth interview (n = 22) with MSM from two major cities in Taiwan, we drew on the theoretical framework of the social ecological model and identified three levels of influences, including individual, interpersonal, and sociocultural, that shape the enablers, inhibitors, risks and challenges, and support towards MSM's PrEP use. We proposed correspondent technological design implications to support what we found based on the understanding of our participants.

Smartphone addiction refers to the problematic use of smartphones, which can negatively impact one’s quality of life and even health. We conducted a two-week technology probe study to explore the use of technologies aimed at improving smartphone addiction among seven dyads of adolescents and their parents. Interviews conducted during and after the probe study revealed that manually reporting lifestyle and well-being data could provide motivation to improve one’s lifestyle and well-being by moderating phone use. Sharing smartphone use data with parents was also shown to head off negative communication loops and foster opportunities to overcome the smartphone addiction.

Technology abuse among adolescents refers to the problematic use of technology devices, and the negative impact it can have on lifestyle and one's physical and mental health. This paper reports on in-depth interviews with 15 dyads of adolescent patients, their parents, and four experts with the objective of unraveling the issue of technology abuse. We conducted qualitative analysis aimed at unpacking the contextual factors affecting technology abuse, and differences between adolescents and their parents pertaining to this issue. Our discussions led us to formulate solutions to technology abuse: (1) motivating adolescents by sending timely reminders and providing interactive micro-incentives; (2) promoting communication between adolescents and their parents by sharing usage data related to device usage; and (3) incorporating social supports to complement parental support, while fulfilling the adolescent's social needs. This paper provides valuable insights into the design of technological solutions aimed at mediating technology abuse.

Live streaming is a form of media that allows streamers to directly interact with their audience. Previous research has explored mental health, Twitch.tv and live streaming platforms, and users' social motivations behind watching live streams separately. However, few have explored how these all intertwine in conversations involving intimate, self-disclosing topics, such as mental health. Live streams are unique in that they are largely masspersonal in nature; streamers broadcast themselves to mostly unknown viewers, but may choose to interact with them in a personal way. This study aims to understand users' motivations, preferences, and habits behind participating in mental health discussions on live streams. We interviewed 25 Twitch viewers about the streamers they watch, how they interact in mental health discussions, and how they believe streamers should discuss mental health on live streams. Our findings are contextualized in the dynamics in which these discussions occur. Overall, we found that the innate design of the Twitch platform promotes a user-hierarchy in the ecosystem of streamers and their communities, which may affect how mental health is discussed.

Maintaining an awareness of one’s well-being and making work-related decisions to achieve work-life balance is critical for flexible long-hour workers. In this study, we propose that social sensing could address bottlenecks in worker’s awareness, interpretation of the informatics, and subsequent behavioral change. We conducted a four-week technology probe study by recruiting flexible long-hour professional drivers (Taxi and Uber drivers) and their significant others to use a social sensing prototype which collects data from the drivers and shares it with their partners as well as incorporates partners’ observations. We interviewed them before and after the probe study and found that while technological sensing was able to increase drivers’ awareness of their well-being status and intention to modify behaviors. The “social sensing” design was able to further shape such awareness or intention into action, highlighting the potential of using the sociotechnical approach in promoting work-life balance among long-hour workers.

Ride-sharing platforms have rapidly spread and disrupted ride hailing markets, resulting in conflicts between ride-sharing and taxi drivers. Taxi drivers claim that their counterparts have unfair advantages in terms of lower prices and a more stable customer base, making it difficult to earn a living. Local government entities have dealt with this disruption and conflict in different ways, often looking towards some form of regulation. While there have been discussions about what the regulation should be, there has been less work looking at what impacts regulations have on ride-sharing drivers and their usage of the platforms. In this paper we present our interview study of ride-sharing drivers in Taiwan, who have gone through three distinct phases of regulation. Drivers felt that regulations legitimized their work, while having to navigate consequences related to regulated access to platforms and fundamental changes to the "gig'' of ride-sharing.

In this workshop, we intend to bring scholars and practitioners of MobileHCI conference who are interested in designing technology use for children and their parents. Parents are concerned with technology addiction for their children but generally feel loss of control in the ubiquity of mobile devices. We believe mobile design community can contribute meaningful ideas in this space. The goal of this workshop is for participants to co-develop a shared vocabulary and framework for "designing bounded and nuanced technology" as a strategy to be deployed in conceiving and implementing mobile technologies for family use.

In workplaces, knowledge has the property of being individually kept and collectively shared. It is distributed and embedded among members but needs to be transferred and pooled through knowledge networks for successful collaboration. In order to understand and embody such networks, we employed a mixture of field observations, social network analysis, and in-depth interviews to examine the practices of knowledge transfer in a local financial institute (N=32). Results from the analyses show that there is a discrepancy between inbound and outbound knowledge transfer, and also suggest that expertise or social relation cannot solely account for members' decision on whom to ask questions and share knowledge. We also found that scaffolding workers to connect to the right person with metaknowledge of the knowledge network is important. Our findings point to research and design opportunities to support knowledge transfer at the collaborative level within a knowledge community.

Uber is a ride-sharing platform that is part of the 'gig-economy,' where the platform supports and coordinates a labor market in which there are a large number of ephemeral, piecemeal jobs. Despite numerous efforts to understand the impacts of these platforms and their algorithms on Uber drivers, how to better serve and support drivers with these platforms remains an open challenge. In this paper, we frame Uber through the lens of Stakeholder Theory to highlight drivers' position in the workplace, which helps inform the design of a more ethical and effective platform. To this end, we analyzed Uber drivers' forum discussions about their lived experiences of working with the Uber platform. We identify and discuss the impact of the stakes that drivers have in relation to both the Uber corporation and their passengers, and look at how these stakes impact both the platform and drivers' practices.

In romantic relationships, Instant Messaging (IM) can serve as a communication channel to maintain a sense of mutual presence and relational closeness when being physically separated. However, IM is asynchronous by design. There can exist time delay for people to receive and reply to incoming messages, which may violate romantic partner's mutual expectation. Limited understanding is available around how unintended and intended delays affect the relationship of romantic partners. This work examines how romantic partners grow, perceive, and use mutual knowledge about each other in delayed IM to resolve the expectancy violation. We conducted a 7-day diary study on 16 pairs of romantic couples and used the diary entries as probes for post-study one-on-one interviews. Our findings show that couples employ different strategies of information grounding to parse and resolve delayed IM. Based on these findings, we propose several theoretical and practical implications.

We report an investigation of how older adults engage in social activities and community events in support of their mental, physical, and emotional health. We focus on personal and collaborative agency in a community context, and construe health as an outcome that is coproduced by a person and other engaged community members. Using qualitative methods, we investigated the coproduction of health among members of retirement communities and people who are ageing in place. We found that our participants, irrespective of living arrangements, engaged in a diverse range of coproduction activities, including physical, socialising, service, discussion, and interest-based activities. We also identified desired but less-supported coproduction opportunities, such as opportunistic activities and the need to better appropriate social resources to enable coproductions. We draw from these findings to consider design implications of technological support for facilitating older adults to coproduce.

To accomplish collaborative work, collaborators need to know one another's states of work for coordination. Similarly, in situations of knowledge transfer where experts need to instruct novices by passing implicit knowledge and personal experience about the task, one challenge lies in the knowledge gap between experts and novices. Both parties need to gain an awareness of each other's state of task knowledge for effective knowledge transfer. In this paper, we aim to investigate how online knowledge transfer is supported by a design called knowledge transparency of a shared document workspace, which allows explicitly annotating and sharing ones' knowledge state to make it visible to their collaborators. We conducted a laboratory study to examine how knowledge transparency affects knowledge transfer among experts and novices using an image editing task over an online document. The results shed light on how to support knowledge co-construction and communication for the purpose of knowledge transfer through interface design.

We present a lab study of multiple feedback designs for guiding small-scale arm-and-hand movement for people with visual impairments (PVI), so that they can reach out to and grasp an item on a shelf. Little attention has been paid to the guidance of small-scale arm-and-hand movements by PVI, yet this is an essential element of product acquisition in a grocery shopping task and other similar daily activities. We developed a feedback interface that allowed us to explore two types of auditory feedback (speech and tones), haptic vibration feedback, and a combination of both. The result of the study demonstrated that the multi-modal navigational feedback, specifically speech and haptic, was the most effective and preferred mode for small-scale navigation.

Collaborative learning technology has been widely applied in various disciplines in support of dialectical discourse and argumentation. Technologies not only allow multiple users to concurrently analyze and edit documents in the same virtual space but also present richer cues for collaboration awareness. However, researchers still know very little about how the synching mechanisms work together to support small group collaborative argument creation. This study investigates the experiences of 14 dyads that worked together in Critical Thinker, a web application that enables learners to collaborate on an argumentative task with a juxtaposed argumentation structure and multiple synchronous collaboration affordances. Our qualitative data showed that the learners are able to leverage different synching mechanisms in a complementary manner and appropriate the dialectic structure for collaborative argumentation.

It is important to support independent living for people with visual impairments (PVI). Part of this can be accomplished with individual assistive technologies. However, in this paper we emphasize the social and collaborative needs for PVI to fully integrate into society as equals. The study assesses how PVI collaborate with different types of sighted partners when shopping together. We chose to study grocery shopping because it is a critical and challenging task for PVI. We conducted field observations and in-depth interviews with five PVI and their sighted shopping partners, including spouses, caseworkers, and store-provided courtesy shoppers. We found several factors that modulated these collaborations with varying forms of common ground: 1) knowledge about how to assist PVI; 2) interpersonal knowledge resulting from common experience and interpersonal relationship history; and 3) knowledge of shopping as a practice. We discuss our findings with respect to the implications for designing collaborative interactions.

Isolation and loneliness has been shown to be a significant cause of disease and mortality among elderly adults. The coproduction of activity is one potential method of prevention, through the promotion of social interaction and community engagement. The present study aims to facilitate coproduction in a continuing care retirement community, promoting health and wellness in elderly adults. To achieve this, we engage in the participatory design of a public interactive display for organizing community activity. We explore design needs and usability concerns from elderly residents, and discuss the trajectory of co-design work to realize this technological intervention.

One growing use of computer-based communication media is for gathering people to initiate or sustain social events. Although the use of computer-mediated communication and social network sites such as Facebook for event promotion is becoming popular, online participation in an event does not always translate to offline attendance. In this paper, we report on an interview study of 31 participants that examines how people handle online event invitations and what influences their online and offline participation. The results show that people's event participation is shaped by their social perceptions of the event's nature (e.g., public or private), their relationships to others (e.g., the strength of their connections to other invitees), and the medium used to communicate event information (e.g., targeted invitation via email or spam communication via Facebook event page). By exploring how people decide whether to participate online or offline, the results illuminate the sophisticated nature of the mechanisms that affect participation and have design implications that can bridge virtual and real attendance.

Informal communication in organizations has many benefits, but people who are not native speakers of the organization's common language may find it hard to interact informally. In an interview study of nine native English-speaking and 33 non-native English-speaking students at a large U.S. university, we explore how native language shapes patterns of informal interaction. We found that non-native speakers generally preferred interacting informally with fellow speakers of their own native language as opposed to native English speakers, which hinders communication and collaboration between groups. Three factors led to this "clustering" effect: issues of common ground, feelings of social obligation to other speakers of one's native language, and desires to build social networks within a language group. Four factors led to greater motivation for cross-language interaction: a desire to build bridging capital, physical proximity, one-on-one or small-group interaction, and an established work relationship. The findings suggest ways that communication tools might reduce barriers to informal interaction between speakers of different native languages.