Human-Computer Interaction

Health information management for cancer care is a challenging and personal process that changes over time based on one’s needs, goals, and health status. While technologies supporting health information management appear promising, we do not fully understand how health information tools fit into patients’ daily lives. To better understand the opportunities and usage barriers of these tools, we designed and deployed a mobile, tablet-based health management aid: My Journey Compass. After one month of use, we interviewed twelve breast cancer patients to investigate their initial patterns of adoption, adaptation, use and non-use. We found that developing a tool that was customizable, mobile, and integrated into the patients’ healthcare system resulted in a set of surprising uses by breast cancer patients for a wide variety of tasks. Our study demonstrates the potential for health management tools to improve the cancer care experience and for HCI research to influence existing healthcare systems.

Patient-centered technologies demonstrate great promise for users, however they often focus on solitary moments or singular tasks within a broader healthcare journey. We utilized a technology probe to investigate how patients managing long-term diseases use flexible health tools throughout their health journeys. Through a yearlong deployment, we provided 36 cancer patients with a suite of resources on customizable mobile tablets. The majority of our participants did engage with the technology throughout treatment and into survivorship. We analyzed participants’ tablet adoption, usage patterns, and customization and describe how each of these influenced technology engagement and changes in use. Finally, we identified a set of lessons researchers can use to guide the design of future patient-centered technologies. Specifically, we discovered that customizable tools reveal insights into patients’ goals and values, integrating health and non-health resources encourages participants to return to health resources when needed, and a need exists to expand our definition of health resources.

" Don't Open That Door " is a gesture-based interactive narrative project set in the universe of the TV show Supernatural. The project leverages expectations of the horror genre and fan knowledge of the show to elicit expressive interactions and provide satisfying dramatic responses within a seamless scenario in order to create dramatic agency for the interactor. We use verbal, audiovisual, reactive, and mimetic techniques to script the interactor. From our research, design process, and user observations, we gain insight in to designing for dramatic agency and managing user expectations in gesture-based interactive systems.

Natural movement and locomotion in Virtual Environments (VE) is constrained by the user's immediate physical space. To overcome this obstacle, researchers have established the use of impossible spaces. This work illustrates how impossible spaces can be utilized to enhance the aesthetics of, and presence within, an interactive narrative. This is done by creating impossible spaces with a narrative intent. First, locomotion and impossible spaces in VR are surveyed; second, the benefits of using intentional impossible spaces from a narrative design perspective is presented; third, a VR narrative called Ares is put forth as a prototype; and fourth, a user study is explored. Impossible spaces with a narrative intent intertwines narratology with the world's aesthetics to enhance dramatic agency.