Purpose: To define the user needs and preferences of the athletic population in cardiac (tele)rehabilitation (CTR).

Patients and Methods: In this qualitative study, we included athletes with established coronary artery disease (CAD) who participated in a cardiac rehabilitation (CR) program and health care professionals involved in CR. All athletes engaged in sports for at least four hours per week. Fourteen male and one female athlete (mean age 63 ± 10.6 years) participated in CR after an acute coronary syndrome, percutaneous coronary intervention and/or coronary bypass surgery. The twelve healthcare professionals invited included cardiac nurse practitioners, cardiologists, sports physicians, physiotherapists, and a clinical psychologist. This study consists of four phases: a stakeholder identification session, twenty-five semi-structured individual interviews, six card-sorting focus groups and a data analysis phase with thematic analysis.

Results: User needs for athletes in CR encompass personalized exercise plans featuring clear and quantifiable exercise recommendations and limitations. Additionally, there is a need for monitoring health and exercise data; measuring progression and performance longitudinally; easy-to-use, and reliable healthcare information systems with accurate sensors and data; as well as clinical supervision and validation of information and data. Social support from both peers and family is also identified as a crucial need. The preferred technological features for a CTR system tailored for athletes include periodic digital consultations with clinicians, home-based training specific to one’s sport, utilization of technology to monitor workouts, data sharing and remote feedback, personalized exercise recommendations and online educational materials.

Conclusion: This research explored the user needs and preferences of athlete patients in CR. The findings indicated that enhancing CR for athletes necessitates a personalized and sport-specific methodology. The integration of various technological features within a CTR program can play a pivotal role in assisting athletes with CAD to maintain an active lifestyle and regain their previous athletic performance levels.

Nearly 20 years ago, Gaver et al. introduced ambiguity as a design resource, proposing tactics to reflect everyday uncertainty into interactive systems. This approach is especially relevant for self-tracking wearables, which often obscure the inherent ambiguity of system design and tracked phenomena with seemingly clear, prescriptive data and insights. Although scholars recognize the importance of ambiguity, its practical application in the design process remains underexplored. To address this, we conducted a two-week workshop with 60 designers, examining the application of Gaver et al.’s tactics into 11 design concepts, and performed interviews with 16 participants. Our findings reveal eight relevant ambiguity tactics for self-tracking and offer insights into participants’ experiences with designing using ambiguity. We discuss prescription and overlooked ambiguity as levers for the operationalization of ambiguity, the potential benefits and downsides of ambiguity tactics for users, future directions for HCI research and practice, and the study limitations.

As values shape the design and governance of technology, it becomes critical to move beyond universal framings to explore the nuanced, subjective understandings individuals hold about values. Traditional value elicitation methods often identify values at play but overlook how they are interpreted through individuals’ social identities and lived experiences. This paper introduces an AI-augmented value exploration method inspired by photo elicitation, which involves interviews supported by participant-taken photographs. Instead, we use AI-generated imagery to uncover hidden associations and insights around personal understandings of values. In an exploratory study with six participants, we focused on the value of well-being, examining how AI-generated visuals prompted diverse personal interpretations and facilitated deeper value reflections. Our findings show that this method uncovers implicit meanings and deepens discussions by translating abstract ideas into tangible interpretations to yield richer data on situated values.

Background: Cardiac telerehabilitation (CTR) interventions can provide accessible and affordable remote rehabilitation services. However, as cardiac rehabilitation (CR) primarily targets inactive patients, little is known about the experiences with CR of highly active patients (ie, recreational athletes or, simply, athletes) with established coronary artery disease. Consequently, existing CTR interventions do not address the specific needs of the athletic subpopulation. Understanding the needs and values of athletes is crucial for designing meaningful CTR interventions that enhance user acceptance and engagement, thereby facilitating effective rehabilitation for this patient subgroup. Objective: This study aimed to inform the design of technologies that facilitate CTR for athletes. We intended to identify athletes' values related to CR, including health and sports tracking, as well as high-level requirements for technologies that can facilitate the CTR of athletes according to the identified values. Methods: We used value-sensitive design with a human-centric design approach to elicit design requirements for CTR that can serve athletes with established coronary artery disease. To identify athletes' values, we conducted 25 value-oriented semistructured interviews with 15 athletic patients and 10 health care professionals involved in CR programs. In a second phase, we conducted 6 card-sorting focus group sessions with 13 patients and 7 health care professionals to identify desired CTR features. Finally, we derived high-level CTR technology requirements connected to the athletes' needs and values. Results: We defined 12 athlete values divided into 3 categories: body centric, care centric, and data and technology centric. We clustered findings from the card-sorting activity into CTR technology requirements, such as remotely monitored sport-specific training and training data representations next to clinical limitations, and paired them with corresponding values. Conclusions: Athletes have distinct values and health goals in CR compared to general populations targeted by CTR interventions. Designing patient-centric CTR interventions that address these needs is crucial to support optimal recovery, safe return to sports, and adherence to CTR technologies in the home environment.

Cardiac telerehabilitation (CTR) relies heavily on telemonitoring, predominantly gathering automated biophysical or survey data for clinical decision-making. However, lifestyle change during and after cardiac rehabilitation (CR) outside hospitals is impacted by many contextual factors, including mental well-being or social support. Failure to acknowledge these factors in remote cardiac care could result in healthcare professionals (HCPs) offering standardized recommendations that hinder health management. To gain insights into the utilization of contextual information in clinical decision-making in Dutch CR, we conducted semi-structured interviews with seven HCPs and CR experts. Our data analysis highlights the importance of routine, physical, and psychosocial information during holistic clinical decision-making. We argue for a transition towards a holistic approach to telemonitoring in CTR, discussing implications for more inclusive and contextual data-gathering practices.

Informal caregivers’ engagement with patient data is becoming increasingly central to CSCW and HCI research on health management. Cardiac telerehabilitation (CTR) technologies generate lifestyle and well-being data that support patients and their families in recovery management, yet informal caregivers’ roles in CTR remain underexplored. Recreational athletes in rehabilitation are an especially under-researched group, despite their and their support system’s unique needs. Focusing on caregivers of recreational athletes, we conducted interviews with ten participants and used six visual scenarios of a dyadic CTR system to explore their perspectives on data and information co-participation. Caregivers reported that co-participation could strengthen dyadic coping and management but emphasized the need to balance important trade-offs. We provide design recommendations for dyadic CTR systems that balance care needs and preferences, promoting caregiver involvement in a supportive, non-supervisory role. We contribute to CSCW research by proposing a conceptual shift in technology-mediated rehabilitation care: positioning caregiver-inclusive CTR systems as negotiation tools that support boundary work and balance competing care values.

Machine Learning (ML) is increasingly becoming a crucial asset across diverse industries. However, designers lack human-centered processes to envision and develop innovative solutions enabled by ML. By engaging in a Research-through-Design activity, we outline a new design process to generate human-centered adaptive systems enabled by data and ML. We describe and discuss the possibilities and limits of designing with ML, the need to concurrently address user experience and ML aspects, and the implications of their mutual influence. We argue that designers can envision and design human-centered ML-enabled systems if they acquire fundamental ML knowledge, although certain tasks necessitate close collaboration with ML experts. We discuss how uncertainty and risk of failure characterize the outlined process and may limit its applicability. The proposed process serves as a foundational framework for future research in human-centered design innovation through data and ML.

Social media platforms like Facebook utilize AI algorithms to personalize content based on user data, raising concerns about data privacy and transparency. We introduce the Facebook Data Shield (FDS), a life-sized interactive installation that empowers users to visualize and control the data shared with the platform. We deployed FDS at a public design event, to explore user data-sharing and control preferences. We conducteded an analysis of 81 user interactions, based on data logs and surveys. Our findings reveal a preference for increased data control, particularly concerning online behavior and demographics. We identify five distinct clusters for preferred data-sharing settings, which show limited correlation with demographic information. Finally, we discuss the potential for predicting preferred data-sharing settings through machine learning based on our data, and implications for social media platform design. This study contributes to the ongoing discourse on data governance and user autonomy in an era of AI-driven content curation.

Designing with data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) can bring significant value to the development of systems and technologies that promote personal wellbeing. However, there are also unaddressed challenges and risks connected to designing (with) AI for wellbeing, such as the difficulties in ensuring that the generated feedback or proposed interventions are relevant considering the large interpersonal variations between the current, desired and achievable level of physical and mental wellbeing of different individuals. In this one-day hybrid workshop, we aim to bring together design and HCI researchers and practitioners interested in the intersection of design, AI, and wellbeing beyond clinical applications. We will discuss challenges in designing with AI for wellbeing originating from a) the domains of design and b) general issues in developing AI systems, and uncover new potential directions that emerge when coupling design, AI and wellbeing. Our aim is to bring together researchers and practitioners from various fields and backgrounds who use data and AI when designing for wellbeing. Through this workshop, we aim to create a conceptual framework that enables the emergence of rich, meaningful, and ethical solutions for designing (with) AI for wellbeing, while also providing handles to mitigate the emergence of negative consequences.

Machine learning (ML) provides designers with a wide range of opportunities to innovate products and services. However, the design discipline struggles to integrate ML knowledge in education and prepare designers to ideate with ML. We propose the Mix and Match Machine Learning toolkit, which provides relevant ML knowledge in the form of tangible tokens and a web interface to support designers' ideation processes. The tokens represent data types and ML capabilities. By using the toolkit, designers can explore, understand, combine, and operationalize the capabilities of ML and understand its limitations, without depending on programming or computer science knowledge. We evaluated the toolkit in two workshops with design students, and we found that it supports both learning and ideation goals. We discuss the design implications and potential impact of a hybrid toolkit for ML on design education and practice.

Ambiguity is gaining attention in self-tracking research as a means to go beyond the mere quantification of body signals. Recent research has suggested that ambiguity can be used even to enable social connection mediated by personal data. To explore this design space more widely, we organized two design workshops with a total of 67 participants. In this paper, we present three design concepts, as outcomes of the workshops, which use ambiguity to enable social self-tracking practices. We then discuss how these concepts demonstrate the potential of ambiguity to encourage collective sense-making, directly impact the user's social relationships, and offer multifaceted perspectives on reality.

Social media platforms newsfeeds are generated by AI algorithms, which select and order posts based on user data. However, users are often unaware of what data is collected and employed for this aim, neither can they control it. To open up discussions on what data users are willing to feed the newsfeed algorithm with, we created the Facebook Data Shield, a human-size interactive installation where users can see and control what type of data is collected. By pressing buttons, data categories and/or data variables can be (de)activated. An outer rim with lights gives feedback to users about the level of personalization of the resulting newsfeed. We performed a preliminary study to get insights into what data users are willing to share, their preferred level of control, and the effect of such an installation on users' awareness. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for design and future work.

In the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technologies (DT) supported the design and implementation of solutions addressing new needs and living conditions. We describe Design for Emergency, a digital open design platform developed to ideate solutions for people's fast-changing needs in the pandemic, to analyze how DT can affect human-centered design processes during emergencies. We illustrate how DT: i) helped quickly collect and analyse people's needs in different countries, visualize such data, and identify design directions and problem spaces; ii) facilitated the creation of a virtual network of stakeholders and an open-innovation digital platform; iii) inspired the ideation of solutions responding to people's changing needs and affected their implementation. We discuss the implications of adopting DT in designing for and during emergencies, as well as their current and future potential to promptly respond to emergency situations through a human-centered approach.

When designing Machine Learning (ML) enabled solutions, designers often need to simulate ML behavior through the Wizard of Oz (WoZ) approach to test the user experience before the ML model is available. Although reproducing ML errors is essential for having a good representation, they are rarely considered. We introduce Wizard of Errors (WoE), a tool for conducting WoZ studies on ML-enabled solutions that allows simulating ML errors during user experience assessment. We explored how this system can be used to simulate the behavior of a computer vision model. We tested WoE with design students to determine the importance of considering ML errors in design, the relevance of using descriptive error types instead of confusion matrix, and the suitability of manual error control in WoZ studies. Our work identifies several challenges, which prevent realistic error representation by designers in such studies. We discuss the implications of these findings for design.

Current solutions addressing misinformation on social media appear to rely on the misconception that misinformation is predominately spread by Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, the proliferation of false news is mainly due to humans. Solutions to curb misinformation should therefore emphasize human behavioral interventions, rather than focus solely on curbing AI bots. In this study, we analyze social media users' behaviors by means of a user journey. We create VisualBubble, a design probe that encourages reflection-oriented user experiences during news consumption on social media. We test our design probe with 10 users, to determine its effectiveness in increasing users' critical reflection on their news consumption behaviors. The initial findings show that VisualBubble can contribute to more critical attitudes towards the news that users are exposed to and, therefore, has the potential to mitigate social media misinformation.