Congratulations! You are severely underweight—Exploring negative consequences of persuasive system design

Personal health and wellbeing have grown as an object of study within HCI research and many individuals undergoing weight loss journeys use persuasive systems, such as weight loss apps, to guide them. These systems rely on various principles to persuade users toward their health goal and have in much research been considered having positive effects. There are however also parallel findings indicating unwanted effects. To explore the effects of persuasive system design, we conduct a longitudinal exploratory expert evaluation of 10 free weight loss tracking apps by emulating drastic weight loss for an extended period of time. The objective of the exploration is to unravel potential negative effects of using such systems. Our findings highlight risks of negative effects as some apps take a passive stance toward drastic weight loss, while others actively encourage it through design. We contribute to a growing strand of health related HCI research by mapping out the relation between design and negative consequences of persuasive system use

Valuable Visuals : Defining a design space for presenting medical results

Information visualization aims at creating visually concrete representations of big and abstract data. Research shows that the subject has good potential when it comes to conveying information within many various sectors. However, there is a scarce range of research defining a design space for information visualization tools with the aim of trying to convey clear and true information that is completely understandable for many different target groups with varying educational background, cognitive state, etc. To explore the gap of such design and the potential that information visualization has towards it, a study was conducted to gather the experience of healthcare practitioners with various experience of examining and presenting results to patients with a certain condition. To gather their opinions and thoughts, semi-structured interviews were used and from the results, four defined design aspects emerged. These four emerged design aspects have potential to work as a base when designing a future design concept.

Sociala agenter på arbetsplatsen - Vem gör jobbet ? : En kvalitativ studie om AI-roboten som den nya arbetaren

The future workplace may not be a place just for human workers but will likely be filled with artificial intelligence, robots and agents being colleagues instead of tools. In some industries where a shortage of personal is a central issue, digitalization in various fields can be explored as a mean to help. This study aims to discover different aspects regarding a social agent that has been implemented at a dental clinic with a purpose to preform different tasks that is normally regarded as human tasks. By conducting interviews and observations it was possible to shine light at a variation of underlying factors to take in to consideration when implementing such an agent at a workplace.  The study showed that even if an agent is capable to help people with their questions and tasks many users chose other alternatives that did not include getting help from the agent but instead meant that they used other alternatives.  

Sociala agenter på arbetsplatsen - Vem gör jobbet ? : En kvalitativ studie om AI-roboten som den nya arbetaren

The future workplace may not be a place just for human workers but will likely be filled with artificial intelligence, robots and agents being colleagues instead of tools. In some industries where a shortage of personal is a central issue, digitalization in various fields can be explored as a mean to help. This study aims to discover different aspects regarding a social agent that has been implemented at a dental clinic with a purpose to preform different tasks that is normally regarded as human tasks. By conducting interviews and observations it was possible to shine light at a variation of underlying factors to take in to consideration when implementing such an agent at a workplace.  The study showed that even if an agent is capable to help people with their questions and tasks many users chose other alternatives that did not include getting help from the agent but instead meant that they used other alternatives.  

Sociala agenter på arbetsplatsen - Vem gör jobbet ? : En kvalitativ studie om AI-roboten som den nya arbetaren

The future workplace may not be a place just for human workers but will likely be filled with artificial intelligence, robots and agents being colleagues instead of tools. In some industries where a shortage of personal is a central issue, digitalization in various fields can be explored as a mean to help. This study aims to discover different aspects regarding a social agent that has been implemented at a dental clinic with a purpose to preform different tasks that is normally regarded as human tasks. By conducting interviews and observations it was possible to shine light at a variation of underlying factors to take in to consideration when implementing such an agent at a workplace.  The study showed that even if an agent is capable to help people with their questions and tasks many users chose other alternatives that did not include getting help from the agent but instead meant that they used other alternatives.