Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has long studied the design of technology for older adults. A critical turn problematizing how older adults were being framed gained momentum in the 2010s. The literature comprising this critical turn offered insights for what researchers should avoid in their work as well as high level future directions. Past work was critiqued for positioning older adults as incapable technology users, the same as one another, and chronically ill and in need of care. In this monograph, we summarize some of the research that followed and responded to the critiques that began this critical turn. We focus our review on three spaces: technology use, intersectionality, and care. We describe how researchers have fruitfully drawn upon other disciplines including feminist and critical studies, gerontology, social computing, and disability studies to further break down myths, generate knowledge, and open new research spaces. We include our view of the gaps that remain and what should come next.
Participation in organized sport has many physical, mental, and social benefits, but there are a variety of obstacles in joining and continued participation including access to adequate coaching, equipment, and training facilities. These obstacles lead to inequitable access to high-quality and engaging training, which is a critical problem because adequate training is the main gateway to learning and participating in a sport. Increasingly, technology is used to augment sports training by improving its effectiveness, accessibility, and/or making it more engaging. However, the vast and disparate number of fields contributing to these advancements make it difficult to comprehensively understand technology’s current and potential impact on sport training. This review synthesizes work across fields, including human-computer interaction, computer science, sport science, engineering, psychology, and health sciences, into a classification of research and findings regarding interactive sport training technology organized around four characterizing dimensions: (1) Why augment sport? (the goal); (2) Which sport skill is being supported? (the target); (3) Which training method is used? (the method); (4) How is training augmented (the form). From this synthesis, we identify gaps in training technology research and propose a framework that can provide a common base for the design and creation of future interactive technologies for sport training.
Over recent years, there has been an increase in the coming together of interactive technology and water, leading to the emergence of WaterHCI, a distinct subfield of human-computer interaction (HCI). However, there is little work that aims to paint a comprehensive picture of the work around WaterHCI experiences so far, limiting the opportunity to identify directions for future research. This monograph aims to address this through an articulation of prior WaterHCI works structured using two frameworks that aim to offer a better understanding of the design of aquatic experiences through four key user experiences across six different degrees of contact with water. This articulation allows us to highlight underexplored areas that could guide WaterHCI researchers in identifying what to research next in order to bring the field forward as a whole. Ultimately, our work aims to help so that more people can profit from the many benefits that combining interactive technology and water affords.
As data-driven health technologies such as mobile health apps, wearable devices, and smart medical devices advance and become more pervasive, the datafication of personal health research has grown substantially in recent years. However, the field has primarily focused on adult users, leaving a limited understanding of children’s data practices and technology for managing their health and well-being. Given children’s unique skills, needs, and experiences concerning technology use and self-care compared to adults, it is crucial to explore their perspectives on personal health datafication. Such inquiry will help bridge the knowledge gap and inform the development of age-appropriate, engaging, and effective health technologies that cater to children. In this work, we first present an overview of the history of personal health datafication research, child development theories, and child-computer interaction studies, primarily focusing on HCI. Subsequently, we conducted a systematic literature review to understand the broader landscape and identify opportunities for future research on data-driven technology for children’s health. We analyzed health datafication papers centered on children (birth to 18 years old) that appeared in ACM’s library, IEEE Xplore, and PubMed from 2011 to 2021. This work contributes to the literature by (1) characterizing the trends in children’s health datafication research, including identifying dimensions and study characteristics that received wide attention, as well as areas that are underexplored, (2) reflecting on key research themes to guide future health datafication research focused on children, and (3) providing recommendations for future research and design of data-driven technologies that support children’s health and wellbeing.
Since the popularisation of the Internet in the 1990s, the cyberspace has kept evolving. We have created various computer-mediated virtual environments including social networks, video conferencing, virtual 3D worlds (e.g., VR Chat), augmented reality applications (e.g., Pokemon Go), and Non-Fungible Token Games (e.g., Upland). Such virtual environments, albeit non-perpetual and unconnected, have bought us various degrees of digital transformation. The term `metaverse' has been coined to further facilitate the digital transformation in every aspect of our physical lives. At the core of the metaverse stands the vision of an immersive Internet as a gigantic, unified, persistent, and shared realm. While the metaverse may seem futuristic, catalysed by emerging technologies such as Extended Reality, 5G, and Artificial Intelligence, the digital `big bang' of our cyberspace is not far away. This survey paper presents the first effort to offer a comprehensive framework that examines the latest metaverse development under the dimensions of state-of-the-art technologies and metaverse ecosystems, and illustrates the possibility of the digital `big bang'. First, technologies are the enablers that drive the transition from the current Internet to the metaverse. We thus examine eight enabling technologies rigorously - Extended Reality, User Interactivity (Human-Computer Interaction), Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Computer Vision, IoT and Robotics, Edge and Cloud computing, and Future Mobile Networks. In terms of applications, the metaverse ecosystem allows human users to live and play within a self-sustaining, persistent, and shared realm. Therefore, we discuss six user-centric factors -- Avatar, Content Creation, Virtual Economy, Social Acceptability, Security and Privacy, and Trust and Accountability. Finally, we propose a concrete research agenda for the development of the metaverse.
In recent years haptics has received considerable attention from the field of Human-Computer Interactions (HCI) for its potential to provide more tangible and immersive interfaces. In this work, I present a selected review of research in haptics in an attempt to provide HCI and other fields a framework for understanding haptics that will help those fields design better interfaces and, ultimately, new and better experiences for those who interact with technology every day. This collection of essays exposes the reader to the haptics field, the haptic sense, and some examples of haptic technology. They cover over fifty years of research and terminology thus will be a handy reference for any researcher. In the conclusion, I examine the history in light of my own experiences and provide my take on haptics, HCI and what both communities can do to improve research and design.
As automated machine learning (AutoML) systems continue to progress in both sophistication and performance, it becomes important to understand the `how' and `why' of human-computer interaction (HCI) within these frameworks, both current and expected. Such a discussion is necessary for optimal system design, leveraging advanced data-processing capabilities to support decision-making involving humans, but it is also key to identifying the opportunities and risks presented by ever-increasing levels of machine autonomy. Within this context, we focus on the following questions: (i) How does HCI currently look like for state-of-the-art AutoML algorithms, especially during the stages of development, deployment, and maintenance? (ii) Do the expectations of HCI within AutoML frameworks vary for different types of users and stakeholders? (iii) How can HCI be managed so that AutoML solutions acquire human trust and broad acceptance? (iv) As AutoML systems become more autonomous and capable of learning from complex open-ended environments, will the fundamental nature of HCI evolve? To consider these questions, we project existing literature in HCI into the space of AutoML; this connection has, to date, largely been unexplored. In so doing, we review topics including user-interface design, human-bias mitigation, and trust in artificial intelligence (AI). Additionally, to rigorously gauge the future of HCI, we contemplate how AutoML may manifest in effectively open-ended environments. This discussion necessarily reviews projected developmental pathways for AutoML, such as the incorporation of reasoning, although the focus remains on how and why HCI may occur in such a framework rather than on any implementational details. Ultimately, this review serves to identify key research directions aimed at better facilitating the roles and modes of human interactions with both current and future AutoML systems.
In industry, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is transforming the roles of people, technology and work on the shop floor. Despite ongoing strides towards automation, people are anticipated to remain integral contributors in future manufacturing. Where full automation is ineffective or infeasible, Operator Assistance Systems (OAS) can augment workers’ cognitive or physical capabilities. We frame OAS as a subset of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) systems designed for the purpose of workforce augmentation in production systems. However, while OAS are anticipated to address key needs in industry, a challenge for both OAS researchers and industrial practitioners is to identify the most promising applications of OAS and justify them from a value-added perspective. This contribution addresses this challenge by presenting a systematic literature review of 2,928 papers, revealing (a) 11 application areas for OAS; and (b) 12 approaches for assessing the value-added of OAS. Moreover, we discuss implications for OAS, with a particular focus on integrating OAS in industry.
Uncertainty is a prevalent characteristic of contemporary life and a central challenge of HCI. As humans, researchers, and designers we encounter uncertainty in a multitude of forms and a variety of settings. The growing attention to uncertainty in HCI is due to the ever increasing expansion of the field and questions and contexts to which we seek to apply HCI research and practice. It is also due to events in the world that force us to engage more directly with questions related to uncertainty. Consequently, society is turning more than ever to data as a means to enable or mediate our understanding of phenomena such as climate change, political turmoil, increased economic upheaval, and a global pandemic. This monograph examines how HCI conceptualizes, situates, and responds to uncertainty - particularly arguing that our ability to respond to such uncertainties is governed to a great extent by the concepts we use to enframe a single, encompassing, overburdened and slippery idea. The authors propose four distinct "modes of uncertainty" to begin to draw together the varied strands of work in HCI that address uncertainty in its many forms. Rather than focusing on uncertainty as a discrete phenomenon in the world to be studied, they look to how research goals, methods, and theoretical frames used in HCI research influence the various ways in which we encounter it. By switching from uncertainty (a noun) to modes of engaging uncertainty (a verb), they foreground uncertainty as a relational concept and show that it is an active and ongoing condition that designers and researchers make present in different fashions depending upon their priorities and the context in which they are working. The authors show that adding modes of uncertainty to our conceptual toolbox facilitates conversation between domains and lets us draw new connections between disparate areas of research including visualization studies, critical design, feminist epistemologies, and sustainability.
With this monograph we introduce a new, systematic taxonomy of Sports Interaction Technology (Sports ITech) that defines a design space of existing and future work in this domain.We set the taxonomy in a context of our view on sport science and sports practice, target outcomes of sports and the underlying factors influencing them, and the role that sports technology plays to support sports science and practice.In that setting we systematically build and illustrate a taxonomy for the design space for Sports ITech as a sub-area of sports technologies, with specific attention for the adequate inclusion of knowledge from the sports
Readability is on the cusp of a revolution. Fixed text is becoming fluid as a proliferation of digital reading devices rewrite what a document can do. As past constraints make way for more flexible opportunities, there is great need to understand how reading formats can be tuned to the situation and the individual. We aim to provide a firm foundation for readability research, a comprehensive framework for modern, multi-disciplinary readability research. Readability refers to aspects of visual information design which impact information flow from the page to the reader. Readability can be enhanced by changes to the set of typographical characteristics of a text. These aspects can be modified on-demand, instantly improving the ease with which a reader can process and derive meaning from text. We call on a multi-disciplinary research community to take up these challenges to elevate reading outcomes and provide the tools to do so effectively.
The rise of technology that supports a partnership between user and computer highlights an opportunity for a new era of contrasting the previously dominant paradigm of computers functioning as tools. However, most work around these technologies only focused on the instrumental perspective to achieve extrinsic performance objectives. However, phenomenology emphasizes that it is also important to support the experiential perspective, which indicates that technology should also help people pay attention to their lived experiences and personal growth in order to deepen their understanding of their own bodies. This seminar focuses on embodied integration, where a computer tightly integrates with the person's body. Although an increasing number of systems are emerging, a thorough understanding of how to design such systems is notably absent. The reason for this is the limited knowledge about how such embodied partnerships unfold, and what underlying theory could guide such developments. This seminar brought together leading experts from industry and academia, including those who are central to the development of products and ideas such as wearables, on-body robotics, and exertion systems. The goal was to address key questions around the design of embodied integration and to jump-start collaborations to pioneer new approaches for a human-computer integrated future.
Well-designed interactions for visualization systems hold great promise both for empowering people to effectively complete their tasks and for providing more natural and engaging user experiences. Leveraging advancements in hardware and software technology, the visualization research community has made considerable progress providing novel input and interaction experiences. These technologies continue to advance at a fast pace, and thus it seems timely to look back at what has been achieved so far and contemplate what might be possible in the future. In this monograph, we first present a condensed summary of research efforts investigating post-WIMP interaction techniques in visualization systems. We also include research from the broader HCI community and several product releases from industry that we believe to be relevant and have influenced visualization interfaces. Furthermore, we reflect on our own projects that investigated post-WIMP InfoVis interaction and systems. We discuss the main challenges we faced and lessons we learned, and we reflect on how our perspectives and viewpoints on post-WIMP for InfoVis have evolved over the course of these projects. Finally, we identify several open research directions that will help realize the full potential of post-WIMP interaction for and with InfoVis, expanding the boundaries of InfoVis and reaching a broader audience.
Despite the vast number of people who use technology as a part of their spiritual practice, there is little research on the subject in studies of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI). Although HCI takes the idea of user experience very seriously, the field gives almost no consideration to experiences with technology that might be described as spiritual or transcendent. This paper reviews the work that HCI has produced in this area, but also draws on related research in psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, digital religion, psychopharmacology, and neuroscience. The literature indicates that transcendent experiences can be facilitated physically (through natural environments, architecture, art, music), chemically (with psychedelic compounds such as psilocybin, LSD, ketamine, and mescaline), and also digitally (in virtual reality, meditation apps, and research prototypes). While there are a wide range of perspectives within the literature, many terms recur describing transcendence as: ineffable, intense, ephemeral, paradoxical and sometimes sacred; mystical transcendent experiences are characterized by unity, epiphany, and an altered perception of time and space; common emotional responses include ecstasy, tranquility, gratitude, awe, and reverence. Such experiences are similar across religious and cultural backgrounds but interpretations vary according to world view. Studies record benefits of transcendent experiences such as substance use recovery and improved mental health. We explore the themes in the literature through an illustrated design fiction depicting a near-future conference on transcendent experience (TX) research. This is an extended and illustrated speculation around brain–computer interfaces that might evoke transcendent experiences. The article ends with a manifesto calling for a radically interdisciplinary field that would bridge cultural divides and move beyond models of health and wellbeing to establish new forums and venues for TX research.
Algorithms are ubiquitous and critical sources of information online, increasingly acting as gatekeepers for users accessing or sharing information about virtually any topic, including their personal lives and those of friends and family, news and politics, entertainment, and even information about health and well-being. As a result, algorithmically-curated content is drawing increased attention and scrutiny from users, the media, and lawmakers alike. However, studying such content poses considerable challenges, as it is both dynamic and ephemeral: these algorithms are constantly changing, and frequently changing silently, with no record of the content to which users have been exposed over time. One strategy that has proven effective is the algorithm audit: a method of repeatedly querying an algorithm and observing its output in order to draw conclusions about the algorithm’s opaque inner workings and possible external impact. In this work, we present an overview of the algorithm audit methodology, including the history of audit studies in the social sciences from which this method is derived; a summary of key algorithm audits over the last two decades in a variety of domains, including health, politics, discrimination, and others; and a set of best practices for conducting algorithm audits today, contextualizing these practices using search engine audits as a case study. Finally, we conclude by discussing the social, ethical, and political dimensions of auditing algorithms, and propose normative standards for the use of this method.
Highlighting techniques are a diverse class of visual communication techniques that make users aware of salient information in a timely manner. Any visual effect can potentially be used and manipulated to create highlighting effects given the right context, making the design space for highlighting techniques broad and rich. Although highlighting techniques are a common and important part of user interfaces, there is a lack of understanding about how to select, apply, and control their effects for achieving the best results. To address this knowledge gap, we present a new structured design framework – Parametric Control and Construction of Highlights (PCCH) – for describing highlighting techniques in a concise and objective way, using parameters to accurately specify highlighting technique configurations. We then review the current understanding of highlighting techniques, their effects, and prior methods of measuring those effects. We also review underlying human factors that affect how users interact with highlighting techniques.
In the field of HCI, researchers from diverse backgrounds have taken a broad view of application domains that could benefit from brain signals, both by applying HCI methods to improve interfaces using brain signals (e.g., human-centered design and evaluation of brain-based user interfaces), as well as integrating brain signals into HCI methods (e.g., using brain metrics in user experience evaluation). Recent advances in brain sensing technologies, new analysis methods, and hardware improvements have opened the door for such research, which will accelerate with the increased commercialization of wearable technology containing brain sensors. In this monograph, we examine brain signals from an HCI perspective, focusing on work that makes an HCI-related contribution. We pursue three main goals. First, we give a primer for HCI researchers on the necessary technology, the possibilities, and limitations for using brain signals in user interfaces. Second, we systematically map out the research field by constructing a taxonomy of applications, input paradigms, and interface designs. For this purpose, we reviewed more than 100 publications in major HCI conferences and journals. Finally, we identify gaps and areas of emerging work to lay a foundation for future research on HCI for and with brain signals. Erin T. Solovey and Felix Putze (2021), “Improving HCI with Brain Input: Review, Trends, and Outlook”, Foundations and Trends® in Human–Computer Interaction: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp 298–379. DOI: 10.1561/1100000078. The version of record is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/1100000078
In this review, we present an overview of patient-generated health data (PGHD) research, focusing on important aspects that inform and define studies in the area. We start by exploring a fundamental question: what is patient-generated health data? We list the main terms and definitions identified from previous research and generate a set of seven key dimensions for understanding PGHD: (1) the health focus of the study, (2) the type of data, (3) who proposes the use of PGHD, (4) whose data are collected, (5) who are the intended users, (6) how PGHD is collected and used, and (7) the duration of PGHD use. We describe these dimensions and discuss their importance to research PGHD. We then present a discussion of the impact of PGHD and related practices in people’s lives and the debates concerning the consequences, both positive and negative, that may arise.
