Digital Possessions After a Romantic Break Up

© 2016 ACM. With technology becoming more pervasive in everyday life, it is common for individuals to use digital media to support the enactment and maintenance of romantic relationships. Partners in a relationship may create digital possessions frequently. However, after a relationship ends, individuals typically seek to disconnect from their ex-partner. This becomes difficult due to the partners' interwoven digital presence and digital possessions. In this paper, we report on a qualitative study exploring individuals' experiences of relationship break up in a digital context, and discuss their attitudes towards digital possessions from those relationships. Five main themes emerged: digital possessions that sustain relationships, comparing before and after, tainted digital possessions, digital possessions and invasions of privacy, involved and emotional reminiscing. Design opportunities were identified in managing attitudes towards digital possessions, disconnecting and reconnecting, and encouraging awareness of digital possessions

MTOTO: Supporting Greater Access to Pre-and Post-Natal Care for Women Living in Rural Developing Economies

Regions in sub-Saharan Africa face many challenges around adequate healthcare services for their populations. One particular problem is the high mortality rate of mothers who live in rural areas. One of the most critical interventions for safe motherhood is ensuring that skilled professionals provide adequate care during pregnancy and childbirth. Given the challenges of providing quality pre- and post-natal care to women in developing regions, we examine the participatory design of a mobile app for pregnant and new mothers living in the rural town of Laare, Kenya. Results from two previous studies inform the design of a mobile app, MTOTO (Swahili for baby) and provide insight into the notion of literacy, implications for the design of tools and technologies for women experiencing motherhood, and a framework for engaging targeted end-users as co-designers of tools and technologies. KEYWORDS: Pre-Natal, Post-Natal, Mobile App, Mother, Baby, MTOT

The role of digital technologies during relationship breakdowns

Relationship breakdowns are undoubtedly difficult. Access to and use of technology can exacerbate the situation. In our networked society, shared lives generate vast amounts of shared digital data which can be difficult to untangle, whilst social media can provide an outlet to emotions that can take a public and often persistent form. In this paper, we report on a qualitative study that considered the role of technology in the process of a relationship breaking down. Four main themes emerged in our findings: communicating about the separation, change in social status, shared digital assets, and moving on. Opportunities for design are identified in reducing misunderstandings via CMCs, enhancing social media, supporting intimacy in distributed families, and refining service provision

Cognition-aware systems to support information intake and learning

Knowledge is created at an ever-increasing pace putting us under constant pressure to consume and acquire new information. Information gain and learning, however, require time and mental resources. While the proliferation of ubiquitous computing devices, such as smartphones, enables us to consume information anytime and anywhere, technologies are often disruptive rather than sensitive to the current user context. While people exhibit different levels of concentration and cognitive capacity throughout the day, applications rarely take these performance variations into account and often overburden their users with information or fail to stimulate. This work investigates how technology can be used to help people effectively deal with information intake and learning tasks through cognitive context-awareness. By harvesting sensor and usage data from mobile devices, we obtain people's levels of attentiveness, receptiveness, and cognitive performance. We subsequently use this cognition-awareness in applications to help users process information more effectively. Through a series of lab studies, online surveys, and field experiments we follow six research questions to investigate how to build cognition-aware systems. Awareness of user's variations in levels of attention, receptiveness, and cognitive performance allows systems to trigger appropriate content suggestions, manage user interruptions, and adapt User Interfaces in real-time to match tasks to the user's cognitive capacities. The tools, insights, and concepts described in this book allow researchers and application designers to build systems with an awareness of momentary user states and general circadian rhythms of alertness and cognitive performance