Sitting in front of computers has become a major part of our workaday routines, challenging us in maintaining active and healthy lifestyles. This challenge becomes even more salient during this worldwide work-from-home period due to COVID-19. While a large variety of existing interactive systems have been developed to facilitate health tracking and healthy exercises, relatively little research concerns incorporating healthy behaviors as HCI elements in daily routines.

To maximize pervasive health benefits in users’ technology routines, this workshop sets out to explore a design paradigm that enables users to use lightweight, healthy behaviors to perform daily interactions with computing systems. To navigate this new design space, this workshop calls for interdisciplinary endeavors, synergizing expertise from HCI design, health informatics, persuasive technology, exertion game, and psychology.

Call for Papers

We propose a promising but underexplored opportunity for HCI design — to promote micro health interventions by integrating them into users’ everyday tasks with technology devices without disrupting users’ ongoing routines (namely: healthful routine technologies (HRTs)). One simple example could be enabling users to perform healthy behavors such as bodily exertion or deep breathing, as a means to interact with technologies, while they are already engaged in some primary activities with those technologies (e.g., working in front of your computer). As such, we aim at confering micro health gains without disrupting ongoing technology-assisted activities.

We invite submissions of research position papers or intervention/design proposals: 2-4 pages in CHI Extended Abstracts format. We welcome contributions related (but not limited) to the following aspects:


- Novel healthful interactions, e.g., peripheral interaction, exertion games, playful interaction, embodied tangible interaction, etc.

- Understand users and/or contexts for designing health-promoting technologies.

- Behavior change technologies, e.g., persuasive strategies, nudging, social influences, etc.

- Psychological and/or physiological research for improving health behaviors

- Personal informatics for supporting healthy lifestyles.

- Other research explorations that are relevant to this topic.


All the submissions will be peer-reviewed by our interdisciplinary review committee. The accepted papers are eligible to submit an extended verion in a special edition of a journal (TBC).

Important Dates

- Deadline for submissions: 03 Jul 2020

- Notification to workshop participants: 10 Jul 2020

Submission should be sent to: x.ren[at]tue[dot]nl or p.an[at]tue[dot]nl.

- Please see the design instances below to exemplify HRTs.

Breathe-In: deep breathing as a daily HCI technique
Breathe-In is an exploration of employing deep breathing behaviors in the use of digital devices in daily routines. Derived from a breathing training method, the designed interaction technique asks users to inhale deeply and hold the breath for a few seconds. As such, this interaction can be easily distinguished by the system from the regular breathing behaviors of users, and then trigger customized functions that are meaningful to users in their primary activity (working, reading, or driving). For example: turning the page on an e-reader, switching a song in Spotify, or listening to a message just received by phone.

Click to watch the demo video of Breath-In

LightSit: Activating Sedentary Office Routines
LightSit is a health-promoting system to provide office workers with an unobtrusive health intervention and support at-the- desk microbreaks that can be interwoven into a work routine. LightSit consists of a sensor mat that can be embedded into an office chair for measuring a user’s sitting posture and heart rate variability and a lighting display that is integrated into a monitor stand to present information unobtrusively, facilitating fitness and relaxation exercises during microbreaks. The user study of LightSit suggests that the system has the potential to prompt and facilitate small bouts of desk-based healthful activities with relatively low effort without overburdening office work. Besides, integrating sensing and feedback into a workstation made LightSit unobtrusive, and compatible with workflow.

Click to watch the demo video of LightSit

Program

Online channel: Zoom (ID: 925 4971 5545)

Session 1: Paper Pitch

10-min
40-min
10-min

Opening Welcome and Introduction Rounds
Pecha Kucha style presentations of position papers
Summary and discussion

10-min

Coffee Break

Session 2: Co-Design

15-min
05-min
40-min

Introducing challenges for the co-design session
Breaking into multidisciplinary subgroups to work on the challenges
Working in subgroups

10-min

Coffee Break

Session 3: Discussion

20-min
20-min
20-min

Presentation of subgroups to wider group
Cross groups discussion
Concluding remarks and outlook

Accepted Papers

Click to download the papers

Continuous and Autonomous Job Crafting Support in the Home Environment.
J. J. Laenen (TU/e)

MyMeals: Intelligent Healthy Meal Planning Assistant During COVID-19.
Tianjie Zhu (SJSU), Michael Chiang (SJSU), Linh Trac (SJSU), Joshua Zanger (SJSU), Alison Nguyen (SJSU), Yu Chen (SJSU)

Connecting Physical Activity with Office Work through Integrated Systems.
Ida Damen (TU/e)

Contextualizing Digital Services to Promote Healthy Eating in the Office.
Sibo Pan(TU/e), Xipei Ren (TU/e), Desiree Lucassen (WUR), Elske Brouwer-Brolsma (WUR), Aarnout Brombacher (TU/e), Steven Vos (TU/e & Fontys)

Designing for Mindfulness in the COVID-19 Work-from-Home Period.
Bin (Tina) Zhu (KTH)

Clover: A Preliminary Concept of the (Co)Design Toolkit for the Vital Work-Life Scenario.
Xiang Yu (TU/e), Steven Vos (TU/e & Fontys), Aarnout Brombacher (TU/e)

FITT-table: Automatic Standing Table for an Active Work Style.
Hans Brombacher (TU/e), Steven Vos (TU/e & Fontys)

Organizers

Dr. Xipei Ren is a postdoc researcher in the department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology. His current research interests include UX design of digital health, intelligent clinical decision support, and data-enabled health promotion. Ren obtained a Ph.D. diploma from the Industrial Design department, Eindhoven University of Technology, where he explored interactive technology for blending health-boosting breaks into daily office routines. His research has been published in various HCI and design-related journals and conferences. His design works have also been exhibited in several globally recognized design events, including Dutch Design Week 2018 (Eindhoven) and World Design Capital 2016 (Taipei).

Dr. Pengcheng An is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Eindhoven University of Technology. As a continuation of his PhD project, his current research focuses on designing peripheral interaction for busy practitioners, who already engage in busy and highly dynamic routines in everyday work. The research aims for human-centered solutions that enable the busy users to interact with future Internet-of-Things in a natural and effortless way, without requiring their continuously focal attention, and thus becoming seamless secondary tasks to their existing workflows. His related work has been published in major HCI academic venues such as CHI, TEI, and DIS, as well as design venues such as Dutch Design Week.

Prof. dr. Tilde Bekker is Professor of Digital Technologies for Playfulness and Motivation in the department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology. She has a background in industrial and interaction design, with a focus on conducting theory- informed design research. Bekker is interested in designing playful interactions between multiple people and multiple objects in contexts of play, health and learning. In December 2017, she was awarded as an Honorary Professor at the Lab for Design and Play of Designskolen Kolding, Denmark, for her collaboration on education and research. Bekker has been a long- term editorial board member for the International Journal of Child Computer Interaction. She is very active in organizing international conferences and workshops on computer-human interaction.

Dr. Yu Chen is an assistant professor at the School of Information Systems and Technology in the Lucas College and Graduate School of Business at San Jose State University (SJSU). Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She has received her Ph.D. in the area of human-computer interaction from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. She holds her Masters degrees in Security and Mobile Computing at Aalto University and Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and Bachelor in Information Security at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Her research interests include human- computer interaction, computer-supported collaborative work, health informatics, information security and privacy.

Dr. Rohit Ashok Khot is ARC DECRA Fellow and Research Fellow in the School of Design at RMIT University, Australia. Working at the intersection of screen technology and eating practices, Dr. Khot’s work challenges health stereotypes around mindfulness and wellbeing through the creative convergence of design and technology. Dr. Khot has published over 46 scholarly refereed articles in high-ranking international conferences and journals and has received wide media recognition and best paper awards for his work. In 2019, he was awarded the prestigious Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) (398,000 AUD), having previously been awarded RMIT Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship (310,479 AUD), IBM PhD Fellowship (US 20,000), SIGCHI Development Fund Grant (US 24,000) and RMIT Prize for Research Excellence in 2017 and 2019. Dr. Khot is the co-author of the first scholarly book on the topic of “Human-Food Interaction”. He serves his scholarly community by contributing to program committees for leading international HCI conferences and leads workshops and symposiums specifically around food and play.

Dr. Martijn ten Bhömer is Assistant Professor in Product Design and Manufacturing at Nottingham University Ningbo, China. His research aims to investigate how an embodied approach to technology can underpin the design and manufacturing of smart textile products and services. Before working in academia, Martijn accumulated industry experience by working in companies such as Microsoft Research in the UK, Deutsche Telekom in Germany, OMsignal in Canada and Bambi Medical in the Netherlands. His work has been exhibited at national and international exhibitions and museums, such as South by Southwest in Austin, the Museum of Design in Zürich and multiple Design Weeks in Eindhoven and Beijing. His work has been published in conferences such as CHI, TEI, DIS and Human- Computer Interaction Journal.

Dr. Yunlong Wang is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the Ubicomp Lab in the National University of Singapore, where he is working on HCI + AI for health behavior change. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the HCI group in the University of Konstanz, Germany. During his PhD, he focused on designing digital health interventions for sedentary behavior change, which integrated data mining techniques (i.e., human mobility-pattern analysis) and behavioral theories from health psychology into the process of user-centered design in HCI.

Dr. Gabriele Spina is currently a data scientist at HumanTotalCare. He received both his B.Sc. and M.Sc. cum laude in biomedical Engineering from the Campus BioMedico University of Rome. In 2016 he received his Ph.D. from the Eindhoven University of Technology. His research focused on the use of wearable sensors and machine learning techniques in healthcare systems to monitor patient’s status and provide insight into daily life activities. He is author of several publications and patents in this field. In 2018, after spending 4 years at Philips Research, he joined HumanTotalCare to work on the development of new AI-based services for the occupational health sector.