Pedro Sanches

Mind the body!: designing a mobile stress management application encouraging personal reflection

We have designed a stress management biofeedback mobile service for everyday use, aiding users to reflect on both positive and negative patterns in their behavior. To do so, we embarked on a complex multidisciplinary design journey, learning that: detrimental stress results from complex processes related to e.g. the subjective experience of being able to cope (or not) and can therefore not be measured and diagnosed solely as a bodily state. We learnt that it is difficult, sometimes impossible, to make a robust analysis of stress symptoms based on biosensors worn outside the laboratory environment they were designed for. We learnt that rather than trying to diagnose stress, it is better to mirror short-term stress reactions back to them, inviting their own interpretations and reflections. Finally, we identified several experiential qualities that such an interface should entail: ambiguity and openness to interpretation, interactive history of prior states, fluency and aliveness.

License to chill!: how to empower users to cope with stress

There exists today a paucity of tools and devices that empower people to take control over their everyday behaviors and balance their stress levels. To overcome this deficit, we are creating a mobile service, Affective Health, where we aim to provide a holistic approach towards health by enabling users to make a connection between their daily activities and their own memories and subjective experiences. This construction is based upon values detected from certain bodily reactions that are then visualized on a mobile phone. Accomplishing this entailed figuring out how to provide real-time feedback without making the individual even more stressed, while also making certain that the representation empowered rather than controlled them. Useful design feedback was derived from testing two different visualizations on the mobile in a Wizard of Oz study. In short, we found that a successful design needs to: feel alive, allow for interpretative openness, include short-term history, and be updated in real-time. We also found that the interaction did not increase our participants stress reactions.

Knowing Your Population: Privacy-Sensitive Mining of Massive Data

Location and mobility patterns of individuals are important to environmental planning, societal resilience, public health, and a host of commercial applications. Mining telecommunication traffic and transactions data for such purposes is controversial, in particular raising issues of privacy. However, our hypothesis is that privacy-sensitive uses are possible and often beneficial enough to warrant considerable research and development efforts. Our work contends that peoples’ behavior can yield patterns of both significant commercial, and research, value. For such purposes, methods and algorithms for mining telecommunication data to extract commonly used routes and locations, articulated through time-geographical constructs, are described in a case study within the area of transportation planning and analysis. From the outset, these were designed to balance the privacy of subscribers and the added value of mobility patterns derived from their mobile communication traffic and transactions data. Our work directly contrasts the current, commonly held notion that value can only be added to services by directly monitoring the behavior of individuals, such as in current attempts at location-based services. We position our work within relevant legal frameworks for privacy and data protection, and show that our methods comply with such requirements and also follow best-practices.

Time geography rediscovered: a common language for location-oriented services

We propose that the concepts of Time Geography be evaluated as a framework for use within location-oriented services. Originally conceived as a system to describe patterns in human migration, Time Geography is ideally suited for providing the common language and concepts necessary for dialogue within this evolving area. Location-oriented services have been the focus of a great deal of attention, but with research occurring in many disparate disciplines, the lack of a common model that can conceptualize these ideas has not received appropriate attention. To demonstrate its applicability within location-oriented services, we present a research activity which makes explicit use of concepts from Time Geography, with the hope that it can be seen as a tractable and practical solution for several difficulties facing this fast growing area of interest.

Mirroring your web presence

This paper describes the starting points of how to design and build tools to help individual users track and monitor their presence on the web from the standpoints of individual privacy and identity monitoring. It concludes with an overview technological barriers and possible solutions for their resolution. Our design models represent facets of identity by tracking their mentions in text. It is intended to provide a basis for discussion on how to redress the information imbalance users are subjected to today, due to lack of overview of their own online traces.

Awareness, Transience and Temporality: Design Opportunities from Rah Island

This paper deals with the implications of the socialness of private communication. Drawing upon ethnographic observations of first time mobile phone users in Rah, an island in Vanuatu, we revisit the debate on how the mobile phone reconfigures private and personal communication. Our observations show how the advent of the mobile phone disrupts and challenges existing practices around how private communication is managed on the island. These observations are used to open up a design space where we explore the socialness of personal, private communication. Drawing on the analysis, we discuss three directions for future thinking of mobile interaction design: (1) designing for spatial awareness; (2) designing for transience and (3) designing with temporality. We expand on these to discuss the notion of digital patina, which we argue, is an exciting topic to explore for the design of personal, social communication.

Seeing mobility: how software engineers produce unequal representations

ABSTRACT Data produced by mobile networks are frequently presented as useful to understanding social phenomena related to human behavior. The risks associated with making use of massive datasets are often framed in terms of privacy, security, intellectual property, or liability. I show that the risks of mobile data sensing are not reducible to privacy, but are also related to how software engineers produce representations of individuals or populations. I characterize software engineering as a practice of producing abstractions and categorizations by articulating discursive and material elements. These may contribute to rendering certain groups of individuals invisible. If unaddressed, these risks can have consequences at least as serious as privacy violations.

Sensemaking in Intelligent Health Data Analytics

A systemic model for making sense of health data is presented, in which networked foresight complements intelligent data analytics. Data here serves the goal of a future systems medicine approach by explaining the past and the current, while foresight can serve by explaining the future. Anecdotal evidence from a case study is presented, in which the complex decisions faced by the traditional stakeholder of results—the policymaker—are replaced by the often mundane problems faced by an individual trying to make sense of sensor input and output when self-tracking wellness. The conclusion is that the employment of our systemic model for successful sensemaking integrates not only data with networked foresight, but also unpacks such problems and the user practices associated with their solutions.