Author: hj

by Tzu-Hui Wu et al.

Group mood and engagement are invisible currents that shape how people collaborate at work, emerging through everyday interactions rather than isolated individual states. While positive socio-emotional dynamics support collaboration and productivity, they remain difficult to sense and interpret unobtrusively. This work investigates whether posture-based behavioral cues sensed through everyday objects can provide insight into group mood and engagement. We present a pressure-sensing chair prototype that captures changes in weight distribution during meetings. In a study with 14 groups (N = 46), we combine postural cues with participants’ retrospective video annotation to triangulate engagement and mood. Our results show that posture activity is associated with engagement and mood arousal, while moments of shared group mood co-occur with increased postural synchrony. We further identify synchronized behavioral patterns reflecting affective convergence and contagion. These findings demonstrate how situated sensing through everyday objects can reveal socio-emotional dynamics and inform the design of collaborative systems.

Rui Wang et al.

Physical separation between family members arises not only from life choices such as education and employment, but also from health-related constraints that limit physical co-presence. This paper presents StepsConnect, a real-time step-sensing-based ambient display system that transforms personal walking data into dynamic digital art, providing low-effort and non-intrusive presence cues for family members living apart. The system continuously captures step data via smartphones and renders them as spatial and embodied visual cues embedded in everyday environments. We conducted a 90 min laboratory study with 15 young adult–parent dyads, in which young adults engaged in a simulated work session while viewing real-time visualizations of their parents’ step activity. Young adults’ perceived connectedness was measured using the Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) scale and complemented with semi-structured interviews, while parents’ walking data were logged to provide an objective behavioral reference. Quantitative results indicated modest and heterogeneous changes in IOS scores at the group level, with individual variability across participants. Qualitative findings suggested that step-based visualizations primarily functioned as ambient reminders and cues of presence, supporting momentary relational awareness while remaining calm and non-intrusive within the workspace context. Walking data exhibited large variation across dyads, providing objective context for participants’ subjective experience of presence, although connectedness was not simply proportional to activity magnitude. The findings suggest that aesthetic step-based ambient visualization primarily supports momentary relational awareness rather than immediate shifts in stable closeness. By clarifying this distinction, the study advances understanding of how sensing-based digital art may function as a complementary presence layer in intergenerational contexts.

Shanshan Chen et al.

Digital sleep diaries are widely used in clinical practice and research to monitor children’s subjective sleep quality. A well-known limitation of survey methods is that children may not provide high-quality responses because they cannot or are not motivated to do so. We examine how to design “live”, continuous feedback in voice-based sleep diaries in order to enhance the quality of children’s responses. In a co-design workshop, we explored children’s preferences for different forms of feedback. We designed and compared experimentally symbolic (smiley), numeric, and no-feedback conditions, showing that both feedback types improved response quality across questions. Finally, an eight-day field study revealed that feedback resulted in higher and more consistent quality in self-report over time. Across these three studies, children valued playful and clear feedback, with preferences shifting depending on their cognitive needs. Our findings provide evidence that effective feedback must balance affective engagement and cognitive clarity and adapt to different contexts. We contribute empirically supported design insights for creating child-centered voice-based surveys that aim to enhance children’s adherence in independent self-report surveys. Our recommendations based on the study of sleep diaries can potentially be applied in other areas using voice-based surveys.

Shanshan Chen et al.

Children’s self-report is essential for research, education, and healthcare, yet existing methods such as surveys and diaries can be experienced as tedious and so lead to disengagement and low-quality responses. Chatbots have been suggested as a way to support children through conversational interaction, using age-appropriate language and an empathetic tone. Here we explore what could be suitable conversational styles for such chatbots. Specifically, we explore rhyme as a child-centered conversational style. We first conducted a co-design workshop with 35 children, which revealed preferences for short, playful, and soothing conversational patterns. Building on these insights, we designed a voice-based sleep diary in rhyming style and compared it to a prose style in a within-subjects study involving 40 children aged 8-12. Results show that rhyming prompts significantly improved response quality across question types and age groups, while maintaining high engagement even among children who preferred the prose style. We contribute proof-of-concept empirical evidence and design insights demonstrating how phonological scaffolding exemplified through rhyme extends the design space of capability-adapted chatbots beyond semantic simplification alone. While limited to short-term, lab-based sessions, this work provides initial evidence that conversational style can function as a design lever.

By Jing Li et. al.

Exergaming interventions have been shown to improve physical and cognitive functions in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, designing exergames specifically targeting the motor and social skills of children with ASD remains an important open area. To address this gap, we developed WonderFish, a social exergame incorporating bodily interplay theory explicitly developed and designed to engage children with ASD alongside their parents. This paper presents the design and evaluation of WonderFish across four game modes, assessing its impact on children’s motor and social skills, parent-child interactions, and user experience with eight pairs of children with ASD and their parents. We conducted qualitative and quantitative analyses, including game scores, physiological data, behavioral observations, surveys, and interviews. The results indicate that the game mechanism effectively elicited targeted motor and social behaviors during parent–child collaboration across the different modes. However, while parent-child dyads showed high levels of engagement, their interaction dynamics varied notably between the four modes.

by Xinhui Ye et al.

Exploration is central to the design process, as it fosters creativity and improves design outcomes. Within design teams, exploration becomes co-exploration—a collaborative and dynamic practice that this study examines. We conducted a five-month longitudinal observational study with 61 students across 16 design teams, using weekly diary interviews to trace the dynamics of co-exploration. From this, we developed a four-dimensional framework that identified five distinct patterns of co-exploration activities. Our findings reveal how co-exploration emerges across diverse activities and team interactions, fostering togetherness and keeping design teams open-minded. This engagement cultivates collective intelligence and enables teams to share knowledge, build upon each other’s ideas, and achieve results that exceed individual contributions. We argue that co-exploration reflects the trajectory of design success and warrants further study. Finally, we provide actionable insights for practitioners seeking to enhance co-exploration in collaborative design.

Yuan Feng et al.

The conceptualisation and deployment of immersive sensory environments for therapeutic purposes have attracted a growing interest within the field of dementia care. In contrast to virtual immersions, tangible augmented virtual experiences offer a promising avenue to foster the self-engagement of people with dementia (PWD) through intuitive and multisensory interactions. However, empirical exploration of the added value conferred by tangible augmentation in such contexts remains limited. To address this, we investigated the impact of adding tangible augmentation in virtual sensory engagement, analyzing its influences on user engagement, agitation, and apathy. A field experiment was conducted with 15 residents diagnosed with dementia using mixed methods of video coding analysis and observational rating scales. Two experimental conditions (with and without tangible augmentation) and one control condition were adopted. The experimental findings highlight the significant role of tangible augmentation in enhancing engagement in terms of ‘attention’ aspects while enabling the recollection of memories through verbal communication. The findings also indicate a trend to promote positive emotions and reduce apathetic behaviours by adding a tangible layer to the virtual sensory experience. This study advances the understanding of tangible augmentation’s role in influencing cognition and perception aspects of PWD’s engagement and contributes to a more informed design of future immersive sensory technologies.

by Shanshan Chen et al.

Sleep diaries are essential self-reporting tools for understanding children’s sleep patterns, but maintaining sustained engagement and high-quality self-reporting remains challenging. While voice input has been explored in child-computer interaction research as a method to improve engagement, limited evidence exists regarding its effectiveness in supporting sustained self-reporting over time. To address this gap, we conducted a five-day field study with 20 children aged seven to twelve, using a multimodal sleep diary that integrated both voice and text input modalities. Our findings reveal that voice input significantly supports younger children in maintaining engagement over five days, though their response quality remains lower than that of older children. Two distinct response quality patterns over time also emphasize the importance of accounting for individual differences in task performance. Furthermore, input modality preferences varied by age: older children consistently favored text input, while younger children generally preferred voice input over time. These results highlight the potential of incorporating voice input into text-based sleep diaries to better accommodate the diverse needs of children, enhancing both sustained engagement and response quality. Future studies with longer observation periods are needed to validate and extend these findings.