Bridging Context and Culture: Designing Cross-Cultural Solutions for Type 2 Diabetes Care in NigeriaCulturally sensitive design is crucial for developing inclusive technologies, particularly in resource-constrained settings. However, such approaches often oversimplify culture and face challenges in cross-cultural transferability. This study addresses these issues by exploring how participatory design can be both culturally grounded and adaptable across subcultures within African communities. We conducted 13 distributed design workshops with 19 participants, including people with Type 2 Diabetes (T2D), caregivers, and pharmacists, from diverse ethnic groups in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. These workshops informed the design of a mobile health prototype featuring interactive flows in Pidgin English, collaborative care tools, peer support groups, and a calorie prediction feature. The prototype was evaluated by 30 participants through think-aloud sessions and interviews. Findings highlight that while some features aligned with local cultural norms, others were less effective across sociocultural boundaries, even within the same city. We offer insights and methodological guidance for developing digital health tools that are locally relevant and regionally adaptable.2025TATim Arueyingho et al.Cognitive Impairment & Neurodiversity (Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia)Developing Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)DIS
Rethinking Lived Experience in Chronic Illness: Navigating Bodily Doubt with Consumer Technology in Atrial Fibrillation Self-CareConsumer technology is increasingly used to support the self-care of atrial fibrillation (AF), a chronic heart condition that affects physical, emotional, and mental health due to its unpredictability, symptoms, and complications. Through interviews with 29 adults self-tracking while living with AF, we found that consumer technology enabled participants to outsource bodily awareness to their 'digitised heart,' facilitating innovative pill-in-pocket interventions and empowering negotiation in shared decision-making. Drawing on phenomenology, we introduce 'Bodily Doubt' to explain how uncertainty about the body shapes the use of technology in chronic illness and how the use of technology influences uncertainty. Technology mediates 'Bodily Doubt' both by providing reassurance and exacerbating it, particularly when technology fails to adapt to disease progression. Our findings have implications for understanding how technology influences the lived experience of illness, challenging experiential concepts of lived experience in self-tracking and design that foregrounds the experience of the lived body.2025RKRachel Keys et al.University of BristolMental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesChronic Disease Self-Management (Diabetes, Hypertension, etc.)CHI
“I think it saved me. I think it saved my heart”: The Complex Journey From Self-Tracking With Wearables To Diagnosis Despite their nonclinical origins, wearables are emerging as valuable tools in supporting the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Diagnostic data once only available via a cardiologist is now available to consumers simply by wearing a smartwatch, so understanding how smartwatches currently support diagnosis is important for healthcare providers and for the designers of increasingly sophisticated personal informatics technology. We conducted a qualitative study comprising interviews and analysis of posts on an online community of accounts of smartwatch assisted cardiac diagnosis. Our findings reveal how smartwatches bridge a current gap in clinical diagnostic modalities, facilitating a diagnostic journey instigated and shaped by the interplay of self-collected data, bodily self-awareness, and increasing clinical acceptance. These insights focus attention on the consequences of the democratisation of health data, with ethical and design implications for health providers, consumer electronic companies, and third-party application designers.2024RKRachel Keys et al.University of BristolTelemedicine & Remote Patient MonitoringSmartwatches & Fitness BandsBiosensors & Physiological MonitoringCHI
Data Ethics Emergency Drill: A Toolbox for Discussing Responsible AI for Industry TeamsResearchers urge technology practitioners such as data scientists to consider the impacts and ethical implications of algorithmic decisions. However, unlike programming, statistics, and data management, discussion of ethical implications is rarely included in standard data science training. To begin to address this gap, we designed and tested a toolbox called the data ethics emergency drill (DEED) to help data science teams discuss and reflect on the ethical implications of their work. The DEED is a roleplay of a fictional ethical emergency scenario that is contextually situated in the team’s specific workplace and applications. This paper outlines the DEED toolbox and describes three studies carried out with two different data science teams that iteratively shaped its design. Our findings show that practitioners can apply lessons learnt from the roleplay to real-life situations, and how the DEED opened up conversations around ethics and values.2024VHVanessa Aisyahsari Hanschke et al.University of BristolAI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityResearch Ethics & Open ScienceCHI
Challenges and Opportunities for the Design of Inclusive Digital Mental Health Tools: Understanding Culturally Diverse Young People's ExperiencesMental health issues affect approximately 13% of people aged 10-24 years old worldwide. In Western countries (e.g. USA, UK, Australia), mental health issues are particularly prominent in Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) individuals, yet they are disproportionately affected in relation to service provision. Despite demand, there is a significant lack of literature explicitly exploring the design of digital mental health tools for CALD populations. Our study engaged five professionals working in CALD mental health, to gain insights into challenges for service access and provision, and then engaged 41 CALD young people to explore their experiences. We contribute a set of unique insights into the barriers that CALD young people face when seeking help, and their needs for future digital mental health tools. We also provide design recommendations for future researchers on how they might better support the inclusion of CALD communities in the design of digital health tools.2024ESEwan Soubutts et al.University College LondonCognitive Impairment & Neurodiversity (Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia)Universal & Inclusive DesignMental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesCHI
Computational Notebooks as Co-Design Tools: Engaging Young Adults Living with Diabetes, Family Carers, and Clinicians with Machine Learning ModelsEngaging end user groups with machine learning (ML) models can help align the design of predictive systems with people’s needs and expectations. We present a co-design study investigating the benefits and challenges of using computational notebooks to inform ML models with end user groups. We used a computational notebook to engage young adults, carers, and clinicians with an example ML model that predicted health risk in diabetes care. Through co-design workshops and retrospective interviews, we found that participants particularly valued using the interactive data visualisations of the computational notebook to scaffold multidisciplinary learning, anticipate benefits and harms of the example ML model, and create fictional feature importance plots to highlight care needs. Participants also reported challenges, from running code cells to managing information asymmetries and power imbalances. We discuss the potential of leveraging computational notebooks as interactive co-design tools to meet end user needs early in ML model lifecycles.2023AAAmid Ayobi et al.University College LondonAI-Assisted Decision-Making & AutomationInteractive Data VisualizationIntelligent Tutoring Systems & Learning AnalyticsCHI
Co-Designing Personal Health? Multidisciplinary Benefits and Challenges in Informing Diabetes Self-Care TechnologiesCo-design is a widely applied design process with well-documented benefits, including mutual learning and collective creativity. However, the real-world challenges of conducting multidisciplinary co-design research to inform the design of self-care technologies are not well established. We provide a qualitative account of a multidisciplinary project that aimed to co-design machine learning applications for Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) self-management. Through retrospective interviews, we identify not only perceived social, technological and strategic benefits of co-design but also organisational, translational and pragmatic design challenges: participants with T1D experienced difficulties in co-designing systems that met their individual self-care needs as part of group design activities; HCI and AI researchers described challenges collaborating to apply co-design outcomes to data-driven ML work; and industry collaborators highlighted academic data sharing regulations as cross-organisational challenges that can impede co-design efforts. Based on this understanding, we discuss opportunities for supporting multidisciplinary collaborations and aligning individual health needs with collaborative co-design activities.2021AAAmid Ayobi et al.Personal and Mental HealthCSCW
What do Teens Make of Personal Informatics? Young People's Responses to Self-Tracking Practices for Self-Determined MotivesPersonal informatics (PI) technologies allow users to collect data about aspects of their lifestyle like mood or step count. Though teens increasingly encounter and use such technologies, little is known about how they ascribe meaning to their own PI activities. We report a qualitative study of the PI experiences of eighteen teens (aged 14 – 17). Following a learning phase focused on interpreting PI data, participants chose a personal goal that interested them and a PI tool to track it for 4-8 weeks in everyday contexts. Participants proved to be competent, flexible users of PI tools, tracking a range of meaningful life factors, from ‘worries’ to ‘exercise’; they valued learning about ‘natural patterns’ in their lives and were motivated to manage their emotions and evaluate whether they were doing the right thing. Our findings contribute to understanding how young people can engage in appropriation and interpretation of PI data – suggesting opportunities for educational interventions and design.2021KPKyrill Potapov et al.UCLMotor Impairment Assistive Input TechnologiesContext-Aware ComputingCHI
Trackly: A Customisable and Pictorial Self-Tracking App to Support Agency in Multiple Sclerosis Self-CareSelf-tracking is an important part of self-care. However, predefined self-tracking approaches can impede people's agency in managing their health. We investigated a customisable and pictorial self-tracking approach in multiple sclerosis self-management by implementing and conducting a field study of Trackly: a prototype app that supports people in defining and colouring pictorial trackers, such as body shapes. We found that participants utilised the elements of Trackly designed to support agentive behaviour: they defined personally meaningful tracking parameters in their own words, and particularly valued being able to flexibly colour in and make sense of their pictorial trackers. Having been able to support their individual self-care intentions with Trackly, participants reported a spectrum of interrelated experiences of agency, including a sense of ownership, identity, self-awareness, mindfulness, and control. Our findings demonstrate the importance of supporting people's individual needs and creative capacities to foster mindful and personally meaningful engagement with health and wellbeing data.2020AAAmid Ayobi et al.University College LondonMental Health Apps & Online Support CommunitiesChronic Disease Self-Management (Diabetes, Hypertension, etc.)Fitness Tracking & Physical Activity MonitoringCHI
HawkEye – Deploying a Design Fiction ProbeThis paper explores how a design fiction can be designed to be used as a pragmatic user-centred design method to generate insights on future technology use. We built HawkEye, a design fiction probe that embodies a future fiction of dementia care. To learn how participants respond to the probe, we employed it with eight participants for three weeks in their own homes as well as evaluating it with six HCI experts in sessions of 1.5h. In addition to presenting the probe in detail, we share insights into the process of building it and discuss the utility of design fiction as a tool to elicit empathetic and rich discussions about potential outcomes of future technologies.2019RNRenee Noortman et al.Eindhoven University of TechnologyElderly Care & Dementia SupportAging-in-Place Assistance SystemsDesign FictionCHI
Flexible and Mindful Self-Tracking: Design Implications from Paper Bullet JournalsDigital self-tracking technologies offer many potential benefits over self-tracking with paper notebooks. However, they are often too rigid to support people’s practical and emotional needs in everyday settings. To inform the design of more flexible self-tracking tools, we examine bullet journaling: an analogue and customisable approach for logging and reflecting on everyday life. Analysing a corpus of paper bullet journal photos and related conversations on Instagram, we found that individuals extended and adapted bullet journaling systems to their changing practical and emotional needs through: (1) creating and combining personally meaningful visualisations of different types of trackers, such as habit, mood, and symptom trackers; (2) engaging in mindful reflective thinking through design practices and self-reflective strategies; and (3) posting photos of paper journals online to become part of a self-tracking culture of sharing and learning. We outline two interrelated design directions for flexible and mindful self- tracking: digitally extending analogue self-tracking and supporting digital self-tracking as a mindful design practice.2018AAAmid Ayobi et al.University College LondonUniversal & Inclusive DesignUser Research Methods (Interviews, Surveys, Observation)CHI
Internet of Tangible Things: Workshop on Tangible Interaction with the Internet of ThingsThe rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) brings abundant new opportunities to create more effective and pleasing tangible user interfaces that capitalize on intuitive interaction in the physical world, whilst utilizing capabilities of sensed data and Internet connectivity. However, with these new opportunities come new challenges; little is still known how to best design tangible IoT interfaces that simultaneously provide engaging user experiences and foster a sense of understanding about the often-complex functionality of IoT systems. How should we map previous taxonomies and design principles for tangible interaction into the new landscape of IoT systems? This workshop will bring together a community of researchers from the fields of IoT and tangible interaction, in order to explore and discuss how parallels between tangible interaction and the properties of IoT systems can best be capitalised on as HCI research moves increasingly toward the Internet of Tangible Things (IoTT). Through ideation and discussion, the workshop will function as a springboard for the community to begin creating new taxonomies and design considerations for the emerging IoTT.2018LALeonardo Angelini et al.University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western SwitzerlandUbiquitous ComputingCircuit Making & Hardware PrototypingCustomizable & Personalized ObjectsCHI