Stefan Rennick Egglestone

Motivating mobility: designing for lived motivation in stroke rehabilitation

How to motivate and support behaviour change through design is becoming of increasing interest to the CHI community. In this paper, we present our experiences of building systems that motivate people to engage in upper limb rehabilitation exercise after stroke. We report on participatory design work with four stroke survivors to develop a holistic understanding of their motivation and rehabilitation needs, and to construct and deploy engaging interactive systems that satisfy these. We reflect on the limits of motivational theories in trying to design for the lived experience of motivation and highlight lessons learnt around: helping people articulate what motivates them; balancing work, duty, fun; supporting motivation over time; and understanding the wider social context. From these we identify design guidelines that can inform a toolkit approach to support both scalability and personalisability.

Performing thrill: designing telemetry systems and spectator interfaces for amusement rides

Fairground: Thrill Laboratory was a series of live events that augmented the experience of amusement rides. A wearable telemetry system captured video, audio, heart-rate and acceleration data, streaming them live to spectator interfaces and a watching audience. In this paper, we present a study of this event, which draws on video recordings and post-event interviews, and which highlights the experiences of riders, spectators and ride operators. Our study shows how the telemetry system transformed riders into performers, spectators into an audience, and how the role of ride operator began to include aspects of orchestration, with the relationship between all three roles also transformed. Critically, the introduction of a telemetry system seems to have had the potential to re-connect riders/performers back to operators/orchestrators and spectators/audience, re-introducing a closer relationship that used to be available with smaller rides. Introducing telemetry to a real-world situation also creates significant complexity, which we illustrate by focussing on a moment of perceived crisis.

Breath control of amusement rides

Emerging robotic technologies are enabling the control of individual seats on rollercoasters and other thrill rides. We explore the potential of breathing as an effective and engaging way of driving this. Observations and interviews from trials of an enhanced bucking bronco ride show that breath-control is fun, challenging and intelligible, and reveal riders-x tactics as they battled the machine. We conclude that breath control is feasible and appropriate for controlling rides, unpack its important characteristics, and consider how it might be built into future ride systems. We argue that the combination of voluntary and involuntary factors in breathing is especially appealing for controlling rides as it balances game-like elements of skill and learning against the thrill of surrendering control to the machine.

Performance-Led Research in the Wild

We explore the approach of performance-led research in the wild in which artists drive the creation of novel performances with the support of HCI researchers that are then deployed and studied at public performance in cultural settings such as galleries, festivals and on the city streets. We motivate the approach and then describe how it consists of three distinct activities -- practice, studies and theory -- that are interleaved in complex ways through nine different relationships. We present a historical account of how the approach has evolved over a fifteen-year period, charting the evolution of a complex web of projects, papers, and relationships between them. We articulate the challenges of pursuing each activity as well as overarching challenges of balancing artistic and research interests, flexible management of relationships, and finally ethics.

A design framework for a home-based stroke rehabilitation system: Identifying the key components

We present a design framework for a sensor-based stroke rehabilitation system for use at home developed through the analysis of data collected from a series of workshops. Participants had a variety of backgrounds and included people living with stroke and health professionals who work with them. Our focus in these workshops was to learn more about the social context around stroke care, to share early project ideas and develop a design framework for developing systems. In this paper we present a detailed analysis of participant responses and use this analysis to draw specific conclusions about the components and configuration that we believe should be in future systems.

Digital plumbing: the mundane work of deploying UbiComp in the home

Deploying UbiComp in real homes is central to realizing Weiser’s grand vision of ‘invisible’ computing. It is essential to moving design out of the lab and making it into an unremarkable feature of everyday life. Deployment can be problematic, however, and in ways that a number of researchers have already pointed to. In this paper, we wish to complement the community’s growing understanding of challenges to deployment. We focus on ‘digital plumbing’—i.e., the mundane work involved in installing ubiquitous computing in real homes. Digital plumbing characterizes the act of deployment. It draws attention to the work of installation: to the collaborative effort of co-situating prototypical technologies in real homes, to the competences involved, the practical troubles encountered, and the demands that real world settings place on the enterprise. We provide an ethnographic study of the work. It makes visible the unavoidable need for UbiComp researchers to develop new technologies with respect to existing technological arrangements in the home and to develop methods and tools that support the digital plumber in planning and preparing for change, in managing the contingencies that inevitably occur in realizing change, and in coordinating digital plumbing and maintaining awareness of change.

Breathalising games: understanding the potential of breath control in game interfaces

This paper explores the potential for breath control as an interaction medium for gaming. In particular it examines the positioning of breath control within the stack of interface paradigms: As the only control, as a secondary control and as an ancillary or ambient control. It describes a technology developed using specially adapted gas masks to measure breath flow. By describing five simple games (or game modifications), each developed using breath in a somewhat different way, we show some of the possibilities of this unique interface paradigm. Crucially, the paper aims to demonstrate that breathing, though in principle a one dimensional interface medium, is actually a subtle and viable control mechanism that can be used either as a control mechanism in itself, or to enhance a more traditional game interface, ultimately leading to a satisfying and immersive game experience.

Rehabilitation centred design

Stroke is a significant cause of disability, and is predicted to become a greater burden as population demographics shift. Research suggests that the completion of rehabilitation exercises can considerably improve function in damaged limbs, yet these exercises can be both boring and frustrating for patients to complete at home. New technologies create possibilities to support rehabilitation in motivating and entertaining ways, and, in this paper, we present a case study that illustrates the work of designing such technologies for a single user. Participation in this case study has highlighted some interesting tensions between designing for rehabilitation and designing for the user.

Augmenting amusement rides with telemetry

We present a system that uses wireless telemetry to enhance the experience of fairground and theme park amusement rides. Our system employs wearable technologies to capture video, audio, heart-rate and acceleration data from riders, which are then streamed live to large public displays and are also recorded. This system has been embedded into a theatrical event called Fairground: Thrill Laboratory in which riders are first selected from a watching audience and their captured data is subsequently presented back to this audience and discussed by experts in medical monitoring, psychology and ride design. Drawing on our experience of deploying the system on three contrasting rides, during which time it was experienced by 25 riders and over 500 audience members, we reflect on how such telemetry data can enhance amusement rides for riders and spectators alike, both during and after the ride.

Sequential art for science and CHI

This paper illustrates our preliminary studies of new interactive tools that support the generation of sequential art for entertainment, learning and scientific discourse. In the first of two examples, primary school students document a practical science session through the creation of a photostory. In the second, participants in a study on the biological nature of thrill create a souvenir photostory by selecting images from a DVD. The paper is written in a comic-book format to further explore and highlight the communicative capabilities of the medium, one that can be visually attractive and facilitate rapid dissemination to a wide audience.