Aneesha Singh

University College London | UCL · UCL Interaction Centre

Chronic (persistent) pain (CP) affects one in ten adults; clinical resources are insufficient, and anxiety about activity restricts lives. Technological aids monitor activity but lack necessary psychological support. This paper proposes a new sonification framework, Go-with-the-Flow, informed by physiotherapists and people with CP. The framework pr...

Self-management of chronic pain is a complex and demanding activity. Multidisciplinary pain management programs are designed to provide patients with the skills to improve, maintain functioning and self-manage their pain but gains diminish in the long-term due to lack of support from clinicians. Sensing technology can be a cost-effective way to ext...

Physical activity is important for improving quality of life in people with chronic pain. However, actual or anticipated pain exacerbation, and lack of confidence when doing physical activity, make it difficult to maintain and build towards long-term activity goals. Research guiding the design of interactive technology to motivate and support physi...

Participation in climate activism is often facilitated by joining groups on digital platforms, for online and in-person participation in the movement. However, despite the easy access to communities digitally, people of colour (POC) are underrepresented in the UK in climate activism. Little research provides insight into why the voices of POC are u...

Misinformation has emerged as a significant threat to public health in recent years and has been observed across numerous health issues, the most prolific being COVID-19. Though increasing attention has been paid to women's health within the social scientific and HCI communities, very little research has holistically explored the unique challenges...

Background Individuals can experience difficulties pursuing their goals amid multiple competing priorities in their environment. Effective goal dynamics require flexible and generalizable pursuit skills. Supporting successful goal pursuit requires a perpetually adapting intervention responsive to internal states. Objective The purpose of this stud...

Wearables integrating movement sonification can support body-perception changes and relatedly physical activity; yet, we lack design principles for such sonifications. Through two mixed-methods studies, we investigate sound pitch and movement direction interaction effects on self-perception during squats exercises. We measured effects on body-perce...

Many technologies for promoting physical activity (PA) give limited importance to critical variables for engagement in PA, such as negative body perceptions. Here, we aim to address this gap by incorporating barriers and experienced body sensations into the design process for wearables and body-based devices thus expanding the design space for such...

Most research on Location-Based Games (LBGs) has been conducted on non-disabled players, meaning the experiences of disabled players are not well understood and potentially overlooked. As such, this research aimed to address the following questions: 1). What are the barriers and needs of disabled LBGs players? 2). How can LBGs be made more inclusiv...

There has recently been much discussion around OpenAI, Generative AI, use of chatbots and the use of other immersive technologies in the mainstream. These developments have much to offer to older adults in terms of playful, accessible and creative ways to engage with technology in everyday life. In this workshop, we are interested in developing a r...

Propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic and recent overturning of Roe vs. Wade in the United States [21], concerns have grown around the proliferation of reproductive health misinformation online. While a body of work in HCI has explored female health and wellbeing from a socio-technical perspective, a knowledge gap relating to women’s health misinforma...

BACKGROUND Individuals can experience difficulties pursuing their goals amid multiple competing priorities in their environment. Effective goal dynamics require flexible and generalizable pursuit skills. Supporting successful goal pursuit requires a perpetually adapting intervention responsive to internal states. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this stud...

The identities we hold have a relationship with how we come to express and understand our experiences of illness. Language forms a means for us to express this understanding and experience to others, and receive information to clarify our own experiences. Having access to new information when undergoing an illness experience can be integral in supp...

The COVID-19 pandemic forced researchers to find new ways to continue research, as universities and laboratories experienced closure due to nationwide lockdowns in many countries worldwide, including conducting experiments, workshops, and ethnographic work online. While this had a significant impact on the majority of research work across SIGCHI, r...

Smart earables offer great opportunities for conducting ubiquitous computing research. This paper shares its reflection on collecting self-reports from runners using the microphone on the smart eSense earbud device. Despite the advantages of the eSense in allowing researchers to collect continuous voice self-reports anytime anywhere, it also captur...

The COVID-19 pandemic forced researchers to find new ways to continue research, as universities and laboratories experienced closure due to nationwide lockdowns in many countries worldwide, including conducting experiments, workshops, and ethnographic work online. While this had a significant impact on the majority of research work across SIGCHI, r...

Background: Many technological interventions designed to promote physical activity (PA) have limited efficacy and appear to lack important factors that could increase engagement. This may be due to a discrepancy between research conducted in this space, and software designers' and developers' use of this research to inform new digital applications...

Menarche is an important milestone and time of transition, where children and adolescents need information and support. Parents provide significant support, but barriers such as parents’ own lack of confidence and information interfere. Existing technology for menstrual health is not always appropriate or accessible to younger adolescents and child...

Negative or disturbed body perceptions are often interwoven with people's physical inactivity. While wearables can support body perception changes (body transformation), the design space of body transformation wearables supporting physical activity remains narrow. To expand this design space, we conducted an embodied co-design workshop with users....

The effects of music on bodily movement and feelings, such as when people are dancing or engaged in physical activity, are well-documented—people may move in response to the sound cues, feel powerful, less tired. How sounds and bodily movements relate to create such effects? Here we deconstruct the problem and investigate how different auditory fea...

Pain is a ubiquitous and multifaceted experience, making the gath- ering of ground truth for training machine learning system partic- ularly difficult. In this paper, we reflect on the use of voice-based Experience Sampling Method (ESM) approaches for collecting pain self-reports in two different real-life case studies: long-distance run- ners, and...

Orientation and mobility (O&M) training provides essential skills and techniques for safe and independent mobility for blind and partially sighted (BPS) people. The demand for O&M training is increasing as the number of people living with vision impairment increases. Despite the growing portfolio of HCI research on assistive technologies (AT), few...

The effects of music on bodily movement and feelings, such as when people are dancing or engaged in physical activity, are well-documented - people may move in response to the sound cues, feel powerful, less tired. How sounds and bodily movements relate to create such effects? Here we deconstruct the problem and investigate how different auditory f...

Figure 1: Factors that influence self-efficacy belief of blind and partially sighted people Orientation and mobility (O&M) training provides essential skills and techniques for safe and independent mobility for blind and partially sighted (BPS) people. The demand for O&M training is increasing as the number of people living with vision impairment i...

Purpose: Previous research reported adequate psychometric properties of the BQPA, which was developed based on barriers detected in the overweight population. To increase its generalizability, to the general population, the BQPA was revised based on a non-restricted literature review (BQPA-G). This study analyses the reliability, factor structure a...

The emerging possibilities of multisensory interactions provide an exciting space for disability and open up opportunities to explore new experiences for perceiving one's own body, it's interactions with the environment and also to explore the environment itself. In addition, dynamic aspects of living with disability, life transitions, including ag...

There has been increasing interest in socially just use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in the development of technology that may be extended to marginalized people. However, the exploration of such technologies entails the development of an understanding of how they may increase and/or counter marginalization. The use of...

Negative body perceptions are a major predictor of physical inactivity, a serious health concern. Sensory feedback can be used to alter such body perceptions; movement sonifcation, in particular, has been suggested to afect body perception and levels of physical activity (PA) in inactive people. We investigated how metaphorical sounds impact body p...

Introduction: Physical activity (PA) has significant health benefits. However, a third of the adult population across Europe is physically inactive and numbers are on the rise. To address this problem, a large body of the literature has tried to identify the variables influencing the adherence to PA (barriers or facilitators). Consequently, it is k...

Interactive sonification is an effective tool used to guide individuals when practicing movements. Little research has shown the use of interactive sonification in supporting motor therapeutic interventions for children with autism who exhibit motor impairments. The goal of this research is to study if children with autism understand the use of int...

Interacting with natural environments such as parks and the countryside improves health and wellbeing. These spaces allow for exercise, relaxation, socialising and exploring nature, however, they are often not used by blind and partially sighted people (BPSP). To better understand the needs of BPSP for outdoor leisure experience and barriers encoun...

Innovations in the feld of assistive technology are usually evaluated based on practical considerations related to their ability to perform certain functions. However, social and emotional aspects play a huge role in how people with disabilities interact with assistive products and services. Over a fve months period, we tested an innovative wheelch...

Objective: This study aimed to develop the BQPA and evaluate its psychometric properties, which covers all the relevant barriers for Physical Activity (PA) reported in the literature. Method/Design: A cross-sectional study was performed in 2019 through a dedicated online panel. A sample of 610 participants was selected using a stratified random sam...

Interacting with natural environments such as parks and the countryside improves health and wellbeing. These spaces allow for exercise, relaxation, socialising and exploring nature, however, they are often not used by blind and partially sighted people (BPSP). To better understand the needs of BPSP for outdoor leisure experience and barriers encoun...

BACKGROUND Physical inactivity is a main risk factor of death worldwide, and contributes to psychological and physical problems, including obesity. Physical activity (PA) is critical to preventing health deterioration. Many technological interventions designed to promote PA have limited efficacy as some critical variables affecting PA are not consi...

Background Advances in STI/HIV diagnostics and digital health enable people to self-sample, self-test and receive results remotely. However, concerns remain about poor support and linkage to care. We explored how people access online HIV resources and how technology can facilitate testing, to inform development of software linking those with reacti...

While digital technologies are increasingly being used to provide support and diagnoses remotely, it is unclear whether they offer adequate emotional support and appropriate messages in navigating complex, stigmatised and sensitive conditions that can have a momentous impact on people's lives. In this paper, we investigate how and why people access...

Research shows that exposure to nature has benefits for people's mental and physical health and that ubiquitous and mobile technologies encourage engagement with nature. However, existing research in this area is primarily focused on people without visual impairments and is not inclusive of blind and partially sighted individuals. To address this g...

Increasingly popular, long-distance running events (LDRE) attract not just runners but an exponentially increasing number of spectators. Due to the long duration and broad geographic spread of such events, interactions between them are limited to brief moments when runners (R) pass by their supporting spectators (S). Current technology is limited i...

Objectives: Psychologically informed practice (PIP) is advocated for physiotherapists to help people with chronic pain. There is little research observing how PIP is delivered in clinical practice. This study describes behaviours and techniques used by experienced physiotherapists working with groups of people with chronic pain. Setting and parti...

Although clinical best practice suggests that affect awareness could enable more effective technological support for physical rehabilitation through personalisation to psychological needs, designers need to consider what affective states matter, and how they should be tracked and addressed. In this article, we set the standard by analysing how the...

People, through their bodily actions, engage in sensorimotor loops that connect them to the world and to their own bodies. People's brains integrate the incoming sensory information to form mental representations of their body appearance and capabilities. Technology provides exceptional opportunities to tweak sensorimotor loops and provide people w...

In many metropolitan cities air pollution regularly exceeds safe levels, with numerous consequences for health and well-being. Current technological solutions often aim to give users control over their air pollution exposure by measuring, processing and sharing data about pollutant levels. We created a speculative face mask that opens and closes au...

Research and development for interactive digital health interventions requires multi-disciplinary expertise in identifying user needs, and developing and evaluating each intervention. Two of the central areas of expertise required are Health (broadly defined) and Human–Computer Interaction. Although these share some research methods and values, the...

Sexual health is an under-explored area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), particularly sexually transmitted infections such as HIV. Due to the stigma associated with these infections, people are often motivated to seek information online. With the rise of smartphone and web apps, there is enormous potential for technology to provide easily acces...

While most rehabilitation technologies target situated exercise sessions and associated performance metrics, physiotherapists recommend physical activities that are integrated with everyday functioning. We conducted a 1-2 week home study to explore how people with chronic pain use wearable technology that senses and sonifies movement (i.e., movemen...

HCI has multidisciplinary roots and has drawn from and contributed to different disciplines, including computer science, psychology, sociology, and medicine. There is a natural overlap between health and HCI researchers, given their joint focus on utilising technologies to better support people's health and wellbeing. However, the best digital heal...

Chronic (persistent) pain (CP) affects 1 in 10 adults; clinical resources are insufficient, and anxiety about activity restricts lives. Physical activity is important for improving function and quality of life in people with chronic pain, but psychological factors such as fear of increased pain and damage due to activity, lack of confidence or supp...

The workshop on "Full-Body and Multisensory Experience" aims at discussing the rich possibilities that the body offers to experience the external world and the prospects that arise for interaction designers when these often-neglected abilities are taken into account. In particular, the workshop will focus on the rediscovery of the human senses, eit...

People's perceptions of their own body's appearance, capabilities and position are constantly updated through sensory cues [10,14] that are naturally produced by their actions. Increasingly cheap and ubiquitous sensing technology is being used with multisensory feedback in multiple HCI areas of sports, health, rehabilitation, psychology, neuroscien...

REFERENCES: [1] International Association for the Study of Pain, “Introduction”, Pain, vol. 24(Supplement 1), S3–S8, 1986. [2] The Health and Social Care Information Centre, Chronic Pain [Online] http://www.hscic.gov.uk/catalogue/PUB09300/HSE2011-Ch9-Chronic-Pain.pdf Accessed: 15 October 2015. 2011 [3] D. Turk and A. Okifuji, “Psychological factor...

Chronic persistent pain CP affects 1 in 10 adults; clinical resources are insufficient, and anxiety about activity restricts lives. Technological aids monitor activity but lack necessary psychological support. This article proposes a new sonification framework, Go-with-the-Flow, informed by physiotherapists and people with CP. The framework propose...

Pain-related emotions are a major barrier to effective self rehabilitation in chronic pain. Automated coaching systems capable of detecting these emotions are a potential solution. This paper lays the foundation for the development of such systems by making three contributions. First, through literature reviews, an overview of how chronic pain is e...

Exergames are increasingly being proposed for physical rehabilitation in chronic pain. They can be engaging, fun and can facilitate the setting of targets and evaluating performances through body movement tracking and multimodal feedback. While these attributes are important, it is also essential that psychological factors that lead to avoidance of...

People with chronic musculoskeletal pain can experience pain-related fear of physical activity and low confidence in their own motor capabilities. These pain-related emotions and thoughts are often communicated through communicative and protective non-verbal behaviours. Studies in clinical psychology have shown that protective behaviours affect wel...

An emerging field of HCI is the use of interactive technology to promote fitness. However, current persuasive fitness technologies for the general population do not address the psychological needs of users with chronic conditions. This is particularly the case in chronic pain. Research indicates that people with chronic pain have negative beliefs a...

An emerging field of HCI is the use of interactive technology to promote fitness. However, current persuasive fitness technologies for the general population do not address the psychological needs of users with chronic conditions. This is particularly the case in chronic pain. Research indicates that people with chronic pain have negative beliefs a...