In the last decade, the number of articles on HCI and health has increased dramatically. We extracted 139 papers on depression, anxiety and bipolar health issues from 10 years of SIGCHI conference proceedings. 72 of these were published in the last two years. A systematic analysis of this growing body of literature revealed that most innovation happens in automated diagnosis, and self-tracking, although there are innovative ideas in tangible interfaces. We noted an overemphasis on data production without consideration of how it leads to fruitful interventions. Moreover, we see a need to promote ethical practices for involvement of people living with affective disorders. Finally, although only 16 studies evaluate technologies in a clinical context, several forms of support and intervention illustrate how rich insights are gained from evaluations with real patients. Our findings highlight potential for growth in the design space of affective health technologies.

We devised a Soma Design curriculum with accompanying teaching approaches for a seven-week course at a technical university. In our analysis of students' design concepts and process accounts, we found that they had opened an unusually rich and aesthetically engaging design space. But we also noted how they sometimes struggled with processes such as: "staying in the undecided" long enough to engage deeply with somaesthetic design imaginings; finding, refining and repeatedly returning to an aesthetic quality through the different phases of their design work; liberating themselves from pre-existing practices or objects in order to find entirely novel design possibilities; shifting from a more rationalistic design process, mainly based on argumentation, into a felt engagement were imaginations are acted out-not talked about; and lacking a technical toolkit for somaesthetically experiencing interactive sociodigital materials. Based on these insights, we provide a set of recommendations for how to teach Soma Design, and we have created an accompanying Soma Design toolkit that will support exploration and design.

We report on a soma design process, where we designed a novel shape-changing garment—the Soma Corset. The corset integrates sensing and actuation around the torso in tight interaction loops. The design process revealed how boundaries between the garment and the wearer can become blurred, leading to three flavours of cyborg relations. First, through the lens of the monster, we articulate how the wearer can adopt or reject the garment, resulting in either harmonious or disconcerting experiences of touch. Second, it can be experienced as an organic “other”-with its own agency-resulting in uncanny experiences of touch. Through mirroring the wearer’s breathing, the garment can also be experienced as a twisted version of one’s own body. We suggest that a gradual sensitisation of designers-through soma design and reflection on the emerging human-technology relations-may serve as a pathway for uncovering and articulating novel, machine-like, digital touch experiences.

No abstract

Research in the use of ubiquitous technologies, tracking systems and wearables within mental health domains is on the rise. In recent years, affective technologies have gained traction and garnered the interest of interdisciplinary fields as the research on such technologies matured. However, while the role of movement and bodily experience to affective experience is well-established, how to best address movement and engagement beyond measuring cues and signals in technology-driven interactions has been unclear. In a joint industry-academia effort, we aim to remodel how affective technologies can help address body and emotional self-awareness. We present an overview of biosignals that have become standard in low-cost physiological monitoring and show how these can be matched with methods and engagements used by interaction designers skilled in designing for bodily engagement and aesthetic experiences. Taking both strands of work together offers unprecedented design opportunities that inspire further research. Through first-person soma design, an approach that draws upon the designer’s felt experience and puts the sentient body at the forefront, we outline a comprehensive work for the creation of novel interactions in the form of couplings that combine biosensing and body feedback modalities of relevance to affective health. These couplings lie within the creation of design toolkits that have the potential to render rich embodied interactions to the designer/user. As a result we introduce the concept of “orchestration”. By orchestration, we refer to the design of the overall interaction: coupling sensors to actuation of relevance to the affective experience; initiating and closing the interaction; habituating; helping improve on the users’ body awareness and engagement with emotional experiences; soothing, calming, or energising, depending on the affective health condition and the intentions of the designer. Through the creation of a range of prototypes and couplings we elicited requirements on broader orchestration mechanisms. First-person soma design lets researchers look afresh at biosignals that, when experienced through the body, are called to reshape affective technologies with novel ways to interpret biodata, feel it, understand it and reflect upon our bodies.