As the global population ages and the prevalence of chronic conditions and acute infections rise, it is becoming imperative to understand the many forms of caregiving labor and create sociotechnical systems that support them. In this paper, we report results of a large survey study with 2000 informal caregivers in the USA, highlighting the fundamental challenges that different types of caregivers face when coordinating care with others. Our findings support previous findings on caregivers’ coordination challenges, while also offering insights into the situational, mediating factors that influence the extent to which care coordination challenges are felt. These mediating factors include caregivers’ relationships, access to a variety of resources including physical, social, and financial support, and physical and mental barriers. We discuss these challenges and mediating factors, and conclude with a discussion on how they can be considered in the design of future sociotechnical systems.

Parents and their school-age children can impact one another's sleep. Most sleep-tracking tools, however, are designed for adults and make it difficult for parents and children to track together. To examine how to design a family-centered sleep tracking tool, we designed DreamCatcher. DreamCatcher is an in-home, interactive, shared display that aggregates data from wrist-worn sleep sensors and self-reported mood. We deployed DreamCatcher as a probe to examine the design space of tracking sleep as a family. Ten families participated in the study probe between 15 and 50 days. This study uses a family systems perspective to explore research questions regarding the feasibility of children actively tracking health data alongside their parents and the effects of tracking and sharing on family dynamics. Our results indicate that children can be active tracking contributors and that having parents and children track together encourages turn-taking and working together. However, there were also moments when family members, in particular parents, felt discomfort from sharing their sleep and mood with other family members. Our research contributes to a growing understanding of designing family-centered health-informatics tools to support the combined needs of parents and children.

For some children, behavioral health services are critical in supporting their development and preventing adverse outcomes such as school dropout, substance use, or encounters with juvenile justice. Schools play an important role in identifying problem behavior and providing appropriate intervention, and these efforts are most effective when executed in collaboration with parents at home. However, home-school collaboration is difficult to achieve. In this work, we investigated lack of information sharing as a barrier to collaboration, through a qualitative study including observation, contextual inquiry, and interviews. We found that policies, processes, and tools for documenting behaviors in schools are implemented without significant consideration toward exchanging information with parents. Consequently, a lack of effective two-way information sharing tended to hinder collaboration and erode trust. Combining our empirical findings with evidence-based strategies for parent involvement, we discuss design opportunities for promoting collaboration toward positive behavioral outcomes for children.

Exercise plans help people implement behavior change. Crowd workers can help create exercise plans for clients, but their work may result in lower quality plans than produced by experts. We built CrowdFit, a tool that provides feedback about compliance with exercise guidelines and leverages strengths of crowdsourcing to create plans made by non-experts. We evaluated CrowdFit in a comparative study with 46 clients using exercise plans for two weeks. Clients received plans from crowd planners using CrowdFit, crowd planners without CrowdFit, or from expert planners. Compared to crowd planners not using CrowdFit, crowd planners using CrowdFit created plans that are more actionable and more aligned with exercise guidelines. Compared to experts, crowd planners created more actionable plans, and plans that are not significantly different with respect to tailoring, strength and aerobic principles. They struggled, however, to satisfy exercise requirements of amount of exercise. We discuss opportunities for designing technology supporting physical activity planning by non-experts.

Approximately 8 million U.S. children have at least one immigrant parent. Lower-socioeconomic (SES) immigrant parents often rely on their children's language skills to problem-solve family needs-a practice known as brokering. Yet it is unknown how children use their language and digital literacy skills to search and broker information online. This paper examines how children with lower-SES immigrant parents search and broker information online. We focused on Latino families as they are the fastest growing U.S. minority group. We conducted in-home interviews and observations of search tasks with 23 parent-child dyads. We demonstrate: (1) how Online Search and Brokering (OSB) is impacted by familial values and resources at an individual, family, community, and digital infrastructure level, and (2) through search vignettes, how parent-child dyads problem-solve family needs through OSB. Our work demonstrates a different purpose of technology use in families: intergenerational, bilingual, and online co-searching to problem-solve family needs.

Since March 2015, the public squares of Havana have been transformed from places where people stroll and children play to places where crowds gather to try to connect to the internet at all hours of the day and night. We present a field investigation of public WiFi hotspots in Havana, Cuba, and examine the possibilities of internet access these limited and expensive hotspots present to individuals, many of who are experiencing the internet for the first time. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2015-2016, we underscore the reconfigurations that have resulted from this access, as evolving internet users reconfigure their interactions with place, time, and individuals in their efforts to locate the internet. We also discuss the implications our findings have for the design of internet access interventions in Cuba and in other low-resource environments across the world, as well as the broader implications for social computing across diverse geographies.

We consider why and how women track their menstrual cycles, examining their experiences to uncover design opportunities and extend the field's understanding of personal informatics tools. To understand menstrual cycle tracking practices, we collected and analyzed data from three sources: 2,000 reviews of popular menstrual tracking apps, a survey of 687 people, and follow-up interviews with 12 survey respondents. We find that women track their menstrual cycle for varied reasons that include remembering and predicting their period as well as informing conversations with healthcare providers. Participants described six methods of tracking their menstrual cycles, including use of technology, awareness of their premenstrual physiological states, and simply remembering. Although women find apps and calendars helpful, these methods are ineffective when predictions of future menstrual cycles are inaccurate. Designs can create feelings of exclusion for gender and sexual minorities. Existing apps also generally fail to consider life stages that women experience, including young adulthood, pregnancy, and menopause. Our findings encourage expanding the field's conceptions of personal informatics.

Diagnostic self-tracking, the recording of personal information to diagnose or manage a health condition, is a common practice, especially for people with chronic conditions. Unfortunately, many who attempt diagnostic self-tracking have trouble accomplishing their goals. People often lack knowledge and skills needed to design and conduct scientifically rigorous experiments, and current tools provide little support. To address these shortcomings and explore opportunities for diagnostic self-tracking, we designed, developed, and evaluated a mobile app that applies a self-experimentation framework to support patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) in identifying their personal food triggers. TummyTrials aids a person in designing, executing, and analyzing self-experiments to evaluate whether a specific food triggers their symptoms. We examined the feasibility of this approach in a field study with 15 IBS patients, finding that participants could use the tool to reliably undergo a self-experiment. However, we also discovered an underlying tension between scientific validity and the lived experience of self-experimentation. We discuss challenges of applying clinical research methods in everyday life, motivating a need for the design of self-experimentation systems to balance rigor with the uncertainties of everyday life.

Sleep is an important aspect of our health, but it is difficult for people to track manually because it is an unconscious activity. The ability to sense sleep has aimed to lower the barriers of tracking sleep. Although sleep sensors are widely available, their usefulness and potential to promote healthy sleep behaviors has not been fully realized. To understand people's perspectives on sleep sensing devices and their potential for promoting sleep health, we surveyed 87 and interviewed 12 people who currently use or have previously used sleep sensors, interviewed 5 sleep medical experts, and conducted an in-depth qualitative analysis of 6986 reviews of the most popular commercial sleep sensing technologies. We found that the feedback provided by current sleep sensing technologies affects users' perceptions of their sleep and encourages goals that are in tension with evidence-based methods for promoting good sleep health. Our research provides design recommendations for improving the feedback of sleep sensing technologies by bridging the gap between expert and user goals.

Prior studies have focused on child interactions in participatory design (PD) with adults and children, but less is known about what specific adult-child interactions constitute a partnership. In this study, we unpack what constitutes an "equal partnership" in PD between adults and children. On the basis of prior literature, we created a new framework that examines the complementary roles between children and adults. Next, we analyzed a case study of a year-long intergenerational design team of children (ages 7-11) and adults. From this analysis, we determined that design partnerships are composed of four dimensions that span from unbalanced to balanced interactions: facilitation, relationship building, design-by-doing, and elaborating together. Finally, to demonstrate its utility, we analyzed two focal co-design sessions using our framework. Our analysis suggests that equal partnership in PD is not a single static interaction but a development over time of design interactions influenced by context, experience, and participants.

In families composed of parents and children, the health of parents and children is often interrelated: the health of children can have an impact on the health of parents, and vice versa. However, the design of health tracking technologies typically focuses on individual self-tracking and self-management, not yet addressing family health in a unified way. To examine opportunities for family-centered health informatics, we interviewed 14 typically healthy families, interviewed 10 families with a child with a chronic condition, and conducted three participatory design sessions with children aged 7 to 11. Although we identified similarities between family-centered tracking and personal self-tracking, we also found families want to: (1) identify ripple effects between family members; (2) consider both caregivers and children as trackers to support distributing the burdens of tracking across family members; and (3) identify and pursue health guidelines that consider the state of their family (e.g., specific health guidelines for families that include a child with a chronic condition). We contribute to expanding the design lens from self-tracking to family-centered health tracking.

In situ self-report is widely used in human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, and for assessment and intervention in health and wellness. Unfortunately, it remains limited by high burdens. We examine unlock journaling as an alternative. Specifically, we build upon recent work to introduce single-slide unlock journaling gestures appropriate for health and wellness measures. We then present the first field study comparing unlock journaling with traditional diaries and notification-based reminders in self-report of health and wellness measures. We find unlock journaling is less intrusive than reminders, dramatically improves frequency of journaling, and can provide equal or better timeliness. Where appropriate to broader design needs, unlock journaling is thus an overall promising method for in situ self-report.

stage of their tool use. We explore how designs can support people when they lapse in tracking, considering how to design data representations for a person who lapses in Fitbit use. Through a survey of 141 people who had lapsed in using Fitbit, we identified three use patterns and four perspectives on tracking. Participants then viewed seven visual representations of their Fitbit data and seven approaches to framing this data. Participant Fitbit use and perspective on tracking influenced their preference, which we surface in a series of contrasts. Specifically, our findings guide selecting appropriate aggregations from Fitbit use (e.g., aggregate more when someone has less data), choosing an appropriate framing technique from tracking perspective (e.g., ensure framing aligns with how the person feels about tracking), and creating appropriate social comparisons (e.g., portray the person positively compared to peers). We conclude by discussing how these contrasts suggest new designs and opportunities in other tracking domains.

Digital social media have transformed how we communicate and manage our relationships. Despite its portability, sketching as a social medium has been largely left behind. Given sketching's unique affordances for visual communication this absence is a real loss. Sketches convey visuo-spatial ideas directly, require minimal detail to render concepts, and show the peculiarities of handwriting. Sketching holds the promise to enrich how we communicate, and its ubiquity is critical for sharing information at opportune moments. We present the results of an exploratory field study of ubiquitous sketching for social media, documenting users' experiences with UbiSketch. This system integrates digital pens, paper, and mobile phones to support the transmission of paper sketches to online services. We learned that UbiSketch enabled participants to leverage sketching's unique affordances, that ubiquitous sketching creates a synergy with the practice of posting context-dependent information, and that it broadens and deepens social interaction.