Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted to support patients' healthcare-seeking in recent years. While prior patient-centered studies have examined the capabilities and experience of LLM-based tools in specific health-related tasks such as information-seeking, diagnosis, or decision-supporting, the inherently longitudinal nature of healthcare in real-world practice has been underexplored. This paper presents a four-week diary study with 25 patients to examine LLMs' roles across healthcare-seeking trajectories. Our analysis reveals that patients integrate LLMs not just as simple decision-support tools, but as dynamic companions that scaffold their journey across behavioral, informational, emotional, and cognitive levels. Meanwhile, patients actively assign diverse socio-technical meanings to LLMs, altering the traditional dynamics of agency, trust, and power in patient-provider relationships. Drawing from these findings, we conceptualize future LLMs as a longitudinal boundary companion that continuously mediates between patients and clinicians throughout longitudinal healthcare-seeking trajectories.

One of the key challenges faced by autistic children is understanding social affordances in complex environments, which further impacts their ability to respond appropriately to social signals. In traffic scenarios, this impairment can even lead to safety concerns. In this paper, we introduce an LLM-simulated immersive projection environment designed to improve this ability in autistic children while ensuring their safety. We first propose 17 design considerations across four major categories, derived from a comprehensive review of previous research. Next, we developed a system called AIroad, which leverages LLMs to simulate drivers with varying social intents, expressed through explicit multimodal social signals. AIroad helps autistic children bridge the gap in recognizing the intentions behind behaviors and learning appropriate responses through various stimuli. A user study involving 14 participants demonstrated that this technology effectively engages autistic children and leads to significant improvements in their comprehension of social affordances in traffic scenarios. Additionally, parents reported high perceived usability of the system. These findings highlight the potential of combining LLM technology with immersive environments for the functional rehabilitation of autistic children in the future.

Touch is an important channel for human-robot interaction, while it is challenging for robots to recognize human touch accurately and make appropriate responses. In this paper, we design and implement a set of large-format distributed flexible pressure sensors on a robot dog to enable natural human-robot tactile interaction. Through a heuristic study, we sorted out 81 tactile gestures commonly used when humans interact with real dogs and 44 dog reactions. A gesture classification algorithm based on ResNet is proposed to recognize these 81 human gestures, and the classification accuracy reaches 98.7%. In addition, an action prediction algorithm based on Transformer is proposed to predict dog actions from human gestures, reaching a 1-gram BLEU score of 0.87. Finally, we compare the tactile interaction with the voice interaction during a freedom human-robot-dog interactive playing study. The results show that tactile interaction plays a more significant role in alleviating user anxiety, stimulating user excitement and improving the acceptability of robot dogs.