“My Tummy Has a Little Dragon”: From Everyday Experiences of Gut Sounds to Interoceptive Interaction Design

Paper Title

“My Tummy Has a Little Dragon”: From Everyday Experiences of Gut Sounds to Interoceptive Interaction Design

Publication Info

• Topic area: Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and interoceptive interaction design.
• Keywords: Gut sounds, interoception, soma design, wearable systems, biofeedback, bodily awareness, multimodal journaling, social stigma, embodied interaction, reflective HCI.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Gut sounds, despite their physiological and emotional significance, are underexplored in HCI due to their ambiguous, stigmatised, and socially sensitive nature. Existing systems focus on measurable signals like heart rate or respiration, leaving involuntary biosignals like gut sounds unaddressed.
• Significance: Gut sounds provide rich information about internal bodily states, offering opportunities to scaffold awareness, reflection, and care. Addressing this gap can expand HCI’s scope to include subtle, involuntary processes.
• Motivation and related work: Prior HCI systems have explored biofeedback for voluntary signals, speculative gut microbiome tracking, and artistic externalisation of digestion. However, these approaches often rely on metaphor or simulation, leaving everyday engagement with gut sounds and their reflective potential largely unexplored.

Solution

• Proposed approach: GastroPod, a wearable system that amplifies gut sounds in real-time, paired with a multimodal sound journal to support reflection and articulation.
• Novelty:
  1. Introduction of gut sounds as a design material for interoceptive interaction.
  2. Development of four bodily perspectives—Registering, Reacting, Reflecting, and Responding—to capture oscillatory interoceptive engagement.
  3. Integration of auditory biofeedback with multimodal journaling for subjective interpretation and meaning-making.
  4. Exploration of gut sounds as socially situated experiences, balancing stigma and curiosity.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Design and deployment of GastroPod, combining a digital stethoscope and bone-conduction headphones for real-time listening.
  • Creation of a multimodal sound journal with body maps, affective scales, and free-form reflection prompts.
  • Seven-day in-the-wild study with 10 participants, including interviews, journaling, and iterative thematic analysis.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Participants reported shifts in bodily awareness, affective responses, and social practices around gut sounds.
  • Journaling enabled the construction of personalised vocabularies and metaphors for gut sounds.
  • Amplified listening prompted small behavioral adjustments, such as meal timing changes and food experimentation.
  • Emotional responses ranged from comfort and curiosity to disruption and embarrassment, influenced by context and social settings.
• Advantage over baselines: Unlike prior systems focused on classification or optimization, GastroPod fostered curiosity, reflection, and playful engagement with involuntary biosignals.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • A seven-day deployment with 10 participants aged 22–36 from diverse cultural backgrounds.
  • Participants used GastroPod for approximately 2 hours/day during meals, work, rest, and social activities.
  • Data collected through interviews, sound journals, and optional audio recordings, analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Small sample size and short study duration limit generalizability and insights into long-term behavioral change.
  • Prototype limitations (e.g., microphone directionality, battery life) influenced engagement.
  • Future work should explore longitudinal studies, higher-fidelity designs, and applications in clinical contexts such as IBS.

Summary

This study introduces GastroPod, a wearable system that amplifies gut sounds, alongside a multimodal sound journal to explore interoceptive engagement in everyday life. Findings reveal how listening to gut sounds reshaped bodily awareness, inspired metaphorical framings, and prompted small acts of tinkering and care. The paper contributes four bodily perspectives—Registering, Reacting, Reflecting, and Responding—as a design vocabulary for interoceptive systems. By treating gut sounds as experiential material rather than diagnostic data, this work opens new directions for HCI to engage with involuntary biosignals as resources for reflective, embodied interaction.