Sarah Homewood

This study explores the phenomenon of energy and self-tracking technologies, moving beyond the context of managing chronic conditions. Our approach to designing from the experiences of people with disability is informed by crip theory, which challenges societal norms of health and ability. We analysed 50 survey responses and 15 interviews with wearable tracker users and found that self-tracking shapes interpretation of energy and self-care strategies. Our findings indicate that tracking significantly affect perceptions and judgments of bodily activity, energy and rest. We found a notable disconnect between the metrics provided by the trackers and the subjective understanding of personal energy meanings, especially during events of bodily and contextual changes such as travelling, illness, or menstrual cycle. This research contributes to discourses on energy in self-tracking technologies and advocates for designing more inclusive, crip futures for everyone that celebrate irregularity, fluctuation, and change, accommodating diverse bodily rhythms in energy tracking practices.

Background Post-marketing risk minimization measures for medicines, e.g. package leaflets and patient cards, aim to ensure that patients and health care professionals receive timely and relevant medicines safety information. The use of digital technologies for risk minimization is emerging but still limited, despite being central in patients’ and healthcare professionals’ information access. There is currently limited high-level, strategic discussion about the digitalization of additional risk minimization measures. Objective To elicit key expert stakeholders’ future visions of digital risk minimization measures in the European Union and to explore possible policy and healthcare implications of future digital risk minimization technologies. Methods Co-design workshops were conducted in three EU member states with clinicians, industry representatives, regulators, health information technology developers, and legal experts. Workshop transcripts and visual products were analyzed thematically in two coding cycles. Results Digitalizing risk minimization measures will transform roles, responsibilities, and collaborations, as stakeholders revise their remits with digital strategies and forge new collaborations to ensure the effectiveness and sustainability of new digital solutions. Success depends on revised implementation pathways that reflect patients’ and healthcare professionals’ digital access to medicines information and the diverse information ecosystems across the EU. Patients may gain new roles as active data subjects through remote monitoring, raising new ethical and legal considerations. Conclusion Digital risk minimization in the EU offers opportunities for timely, personalized interventions but presents challenges in implementation complexity, healthcare professionals’ workload, and patient ethics, warranting more focused policy deliberation and research on digital health.

Reproductive technologies encompass aspects of menstrual health, in/fertility, sexual health, pregnancy, contraception, abortion, or menopause, among many other things, thus entangling aspects of the everyday lives of people of all genders. As reproductive technologies have become—and will continue to be—complicit in enabling or challenging the oppressions enacted on our bodies, it is imperative that we critically reflect on the values and methods used when designing these technologies. Despite a growing body of critical work in HCI, we, a community of feminist scholars working on reproductive technologies, find that there is limited practical guidance on bringing together perspectives such that they can be distributed in easy-to-use, engaging, and collaborative ways. This critical visualization responds to these needs and presents a zine (a collaboratively made booklet) that speculates on reproductive technologies by providing examples from a previous design workshop that happened at NordiCHI 2022 and a guide with activities and reflections on how to organize this kind of workshop. We have also included instructions on how to print and assemble the zine. Some of the examples featured in the zine imagine utopian feminist futures, and some of them intentionally expose or ‘trouble’ the taken-for-granted dichotomies behind the design and use of reproductive technologies. For instance, several examples draw from the feminist value of embodiment and prioritize the qualitative and felt experiences of menstruating. Other projects highlight the risks of reproductive bodies being commodified and surveilled through technology. The projects are presented through a lens of ‘feminist values’, which are particularly useful for critically highlighting existing power structures and instead centering subjective experiences that are typically erased in (cis-)normative approaches to reproductive health. We intend the zine to act as a collaborative, accessible, low-tech, and open-ended feminist tool and to use it as a stepping-stone for bringing together an already flourishing community of designers and researchers. Since the zine itself allows for reassembling and reconfiguring, we envision an impromptu zine-assembling activity at the conference presentation, where we invite the audience to add their own feminist values and experiences of designing (and using) reproductive technologies. The zine is free and accessible online, ready to be used in future workshops, offering it as a guide, but also as an easy way to get acquainted with feminist vocabulary in general. We hope this work is one step towards formalizing an (open) community of people working with designing and researching reproductive technologies in the Nordics.

Interactive systems have become an integral part of our daily lives, influencing how we communicate, work, and play. Understanding the intricate relationship between humans and technology is at the core of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research and design. Amid the array of methodological tools available, first-person research methods have emerged as powerful instruments that enable researchers to delve deeply into the human-technology experience. Five years after the first edition of the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) workshop on first-person methods, this full day workshop invites HCI researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts to embark on a journey of discovery of their sample of one. Drawing inspiration from the rich tradition of autoethnography, autobiographical design, embodied ideation, and more, we aim to explore the omnipresence of technology in our everyday lives while acknowledging our own subjectivity and positionality in research and design.

Long COVID is a new illness, and we still lack medical knowledge about possible treatments. This has led to the independent adoption of fitness tracking technologies for the management of long COVID. Through semi-structured interviews with 21 people with long COVID who used fitness tracking technologies, we found that fitness tracking devices were used to pace energy through finding correlations between activities and data, provide proof of illness to themselves, healthcare providers and friends and family, and to help gain a sense of agency and control during a new and enigmatic illness. Our findings support and extend design openings for the development of “pacing technologies”. These include the importance of customization and supporting the user in their recovery if appropriate, applying strategies for mitigating anxiety when tracking, facilitating the sharing of pacing data with friends and family and healthcare providers, and supporting users in identifying the optimal components of rest.

People with chronic illness often fluctuate between “good days” and “bad days” where symptoms are more or less severe depending on a range of factors and triggers. Our research contributes preliminary empirical knowledge on technology use during chronic illness depending on fluctuations in symptoms over time. We conducted a scoping study with people with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) to understand how their illness shapes how they use technologies in their everyday lives. This research contributes a timely HCI lens on the under-researched illness of ME/CFS, proposes the “trajectories of technology use” model that can be used to articulate how technologies are used during chronic illness, and points to design openings for technologies that are more accessible for people who experience chronic fatigue, sensory sensitivities and cognitive limitations. These design openings include non-screen-based technologies, and designing technologies that acknowledge and adapt to the changing body during fluctuations in symptoms.