Umeå University's logo

In today's society, digital coaching systems for healthcare-related interventions are becoming increasingly prevalent. With the rise of intelligent healthcare systems, new opportunities have emerged for the design and development of solutions that are tailored to the specific needs and requirements of individual users. However, designing an intelligent system is challenging due to difficulties in specifying requirements, future users' expectations, and the system's adaptive behaviour during run-time. This paper focusses on the early phase design process of such systems for the use case of stress management. The methodology incorporates a combination of existing theory and model of stress management as well as two qualitative studies that elicit views of target users and experts. The outcome of this research includes design implications, expected behaviour, interactions and roles, and expected features and functionalities of an intelligent coaching system for stress management. The outcomes of this research lay the foundations to initiate design process of intelligent coaching systems. Finally, this research contributes to enriching understanding of initiating the design process of intelligent systems for digital wellbeing.

Participating in social activities promotes healthy ageing, whereas loneliness and isolation are known to cause adverse effects on both physical and mental wellbeing. Technology that exists in society today can facilitate healthy ageing. However, a gap can be seen between seniors and technology in today's internet and communication technological device's user interfaces. Due to limited prior knowledge of interacting with touch screen devices, seniors sometimes have difficulties using them. This research aims to explore the user interfaces and their elements designed using a human-centered design methodology by involving seniors as activate participants in the design process. This work's outcome can improve current user interface design practices in touch screen devices, which might be seen as contributing step to understand the gap between seniors and technology.

In a natural dialogue, humans can handle misunderstanding, non-understanding, and sudden topic change integrally. An essential aspect of human-machine interaction is natural language understanding (NLU). This work proposes a hybrid model for NLU combining feature extraction with indicator classes (syntactic tokens and sequences) and semantic similarity for automatic labelling and a deep CNN learning model to integrally detect a sudden topic change, misunderstanding and non-understanding. The results report a significant improvement for the convolution model compared to the baseline multi-layer perceptron model for the classification task.

Robots and digital agents find their way in an increasing number of areas in our everyday lives. In this paper we look at the history of coaching devices and their impact on our health and lifestyle, as well as the emergence of coaching robots. We explore the worry that a growing entanglement with coaching technology that quantify our lives may reduce or invalidate the user’s personal experiences and preferences. We propose that the kind of bond that should be formed between user and technology is one that engenders trust while maintaining contextual and user-focused perspectives, in order to preserve personal values and autonomy, as well as the possibility of coaching robots being able to provide these kinds of bonding interactions.

A broad range of aspects are needed to be taken into consideration in the design and development of personalized coaching systems based on artificial intelligence methodologies. This research presents the initial phase of joining different professional and stakeholder perspectives on behavior change technologies into a flexible design proposal for a digital coaching system. The diversity and sometimes opposed views on content, behavior, purposes and context were managed using a structured argument-based design approach, which also feed into the behavior of the personalized system. Results include a set of personalization strategies that will be further elaborated with the target user group to manage sensitive issues such as ethics, social norms, privacy, motivation, autonomy and social relatedness.

The purpose of this research is to explore how an intelligent digital companion (agent) can support persons (human) with stress-related exhaustion to manage daily activities. In this paper, we explore in particular how information about a person's emotions can be communicated to the agent with means of non-verbal communication through tangible interfaces. The purpose is to explore how different individuals approach the task of designing their own tangible interfaces for communicating emotions with a digital companion, and the range of different preferences and expectations. Six participants were interviewed and created tangible prototypes during a co-creation workshop. The data was analysed using theories about human emotions and activity, and translated into a generic user model, an architecture for a multiagent system and interface design proposals. The results include increased understanding of how different individuals would like to express their emotions with tangible interfaces, and informed the design of the information models regarding representing emotions. The study illuminated the importance of personalisation of functionality and interface design to address the diversity among individuals, as well as the design of the adaptive behaviour of a digital companion. Future work includes further studies involving additional participants, the development of the stress management application and conducting user studies where prototypes are used in daily activities.