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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (25 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
Journal of Law and Political Economy, Volume 2, Issue 1 (2021)

This article seeks to analyze American penal law, ideology, and culture through the lens of Marxist theories of commodification and commodity fetishism. It first introduces the “first-order commodification of justice,” that is, the positing of a quantitative equivalence between offense and punishment. Next, it introduces the “second-order commodification of justice,” that is, the notion that the benefits of a particular penal regime can be reckoned alongside other social goods, mediated by the general currency of “utility.” It then considers some of the consequences of this commodification for the cultural meanings of justice and punishment in American culture. It pays particular attention to how the commodification of justice interacts in a mutually reinforcing way with racism. It concludes by arguing that commodified justice can perhaps be overcome through a transition to restorative/transformative justice paradigms, effectuated by an anti-capitalist, prison-industrial-complex abolitionist political praxis.

    Cover page: Commodified Justice and American Penal FormCreative Commons 'BY-NC-SA' version 4.0 license
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2023)
    People engage in self-tracking with diverse data collection and visualisation needs and preferences. Customisable self-tracking tools offer the potential to support individualized preferences by letting people make changes to the aesthetics and functionality of tracker displays. In this paper, we use the customisation options offered by the displays of commercial fitness smartwatches as a lens to investigate when, why and how 386 self-trackers engage in customisations in their daily lives. We find that people largely customise their trackers' display frequently, multiple times a day, or not at all, with frequent customisations reflecting situational data, aesthetic and personal meaning needs. We discuss implications for the design of tracking tools aiming to support customisation and discuss the utility of customisations towards goal scaffolding and maintaining interest in tracking.
      Cover page: This Watchface Fits with my Tattoos: Investigating Customisation Needs and Preferences in Personal TrackingCreative Commons 'BY-NC' version 4.0 license
      • Thesis
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2024)

      Many complex health conditions—chronic diseases, serious mental health issues, and highly-infectious diseases—necessitate monitoring and acting upon health indicators and daily behaviors. Self-tracking technology has value to individuals and public health authorities, supporting collecting and reflecting on data to better understand and manage health. However, self-tracking technology often falls short in supporting complex health conditions as it typically concentrates on single data types, resulting in people abandoning or frequently switching between self-tracking technologies. My dissertation demonstrates the advantages of tracking ecosystems, a technology ecosystem that integrates self-tracking technology with non-tracking technologies, over individual self-tracking technology in supporting complex health conditions.

      My dissertation explores how people perceive and experience different technologies and approaches interact with one another within a tracking ecosystem to support complex health conditions across different societal structures. Individual layer: through an interview study on people's experiences with food journaling apps, I contribute a Model of Socially Sustained Self-Tracking, illustrating how self-tracking technology intersects with social technology to comprise a tracking ecosystem for supporting individuals' eating and dieting goals; Interpersonal layer: through an interview with pregnant people and non-pregnant stakeholders, I understand how people collaborate within tracking ecosystems for tracking and managing various types of pregnancy data in their everyday lives; Socio-cultural layer: By comparing survey answers between South Korean people and their counterparts in the U.S. regarding their perceptions toward contact tracing approaches, I examine socio-cultural factors' influences on how people prefer to have data collected in a tracking system.

      Drawing from findings across three studies, I discuss the benefits and challenges of tracking ecosystems for supporting complex health conditions, suggesting future opportunities for enhancing tracking ecosystems. For example, one important aspect that surfaced in my dissertation is the crucial role of the preparation stage in fostering stakeholders' effective collaboration within tracking ecosystems. I therefore suggest future designs to raise people's awareness about their tracking efforts and facilitate the division of tracking labor among stakeholders.

        Creative Commons 'BY-NC' version 4.0 license
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2021)
        Journaling of consumed foods through digital devices is a popular self-tracking strategy for weight loss and eating mindfulness. Research has explored modalities, like photos and open-ended text and voice descriptions, to make journaling less burdensome and more descriptive than traditional barcode and database searches. However, less is known about how people prefer to journal foods when less constrained by limitations of databases, natural language processing, and image recognition. We deployed a food journal prototype supporting varied devices and input modalities, which 15 participants used to journal 1008 food logs over two weeks. Participants had diverse strategies for indicating what and how much they ate, varying from ambiguous foods to specifying varieties and using different measurements for clarifying amount. Some strategies were interpretable by natural language food identification and image classification services, while others point to open research questions. We finally discuss opportunities for accounting for variance in food journaling.
          Cover page: Investigating Preferred Food Description Practices in Digital Food Journaling
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2021)

          Background

          Supporting mental health and wellness is of increasing interest due to a growing recognition of the prevalence and burden of mental health issues. Mood is a central aspect of mental health, and several technologies, especially mobile apps, have helped people track and understand it. However, despite formative work on and dissemination of mood-tracking apps, it is not well understood how mood-tracking apps used in real-world contexts might benefit people and what people hope to gain from them.

          Objective

          To address this gap, the purpose of this study was to understand motivations for and experiences in using mood-tracking apps from people who used them in real-world contexts.

          Methods

          We interviewed 22 participants who had used mood-tracking apps using a semistructured interview and card sorting task. The interview focused on their experiences using a mood-tracking app. We then conducted a card sorting task using screenshots of various data entry and data review features from mood-tracking apps. We used thematic analysis to identify themes around why people use mood-tracking apps, what they found useful about them, and where people felt these apps fell short.

          Results

          Users of mood-tracking apps were primarily motivated by negative life events or shifts in their own mental health that prompted them to engage in tracking and improve their situation. In general, participants felt that using a mood-tracking app facilitated self-awareness and helped them to look back on a previous emotion or mood experience to understand what was happening. Interestingly, some users reported less inclination to document their negative mood states and preferred to document their positive moods. There was a range of preferences for personalization and simplicity of tracking. Overall, users also liked features in which their previous tracked emotions and moods were visualized in figures or calendar form to understand trends. One gap in available mood-tracking apps was the lack of app-facilitated recommendations or suggestions for how to interpret their own data or improve their mood.

          Conclusions

          Although people find various features of mood-tracking apps helpful, the way people use mood-tracking apps, such as avoiding entering negative moods, tracking infrequently, or wanting support to understand or change their moods, demonstrate opportunities for improvement. Understanding why and how people are using current technologies can provide insights to guide future designs and implementations.
            Cover page: Understanding People's Use of and Perspectives on Mood-Tracking Apps: Interview Study.
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2023)
            The Workgroup on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH) connects academic and industry researchers across human-computer interaction, medical informatics, health informatics, digital health, and beyond to foster a community around innovations in consumer and medical health and wellbeing. The WISH Symposium at CHI 2023 will regather the HCI health and wellbeing research community for the first in-person community meeting in four years, allowing us to discuss and disseminate findings, methods, and approaches towards understanding and creating interactive health and wellbeing systems. We will continue the tradition of providing mentoring opportunities for early- and mid-career researchers, ranging from undergraduates to post-PhD, to establish future generations of scholars in the area. This will be the tenth WISH meeting, following a successful tradition of workshops at relevant venues including CHI over the past decade.
              Cover page: Symposium: Workgroup on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH)Creative Commons 'BY-NC' version 4.0 license
              • Article
              • Peer Reviewed
              UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2021)
              Children are increasingly using wearables with physical activity tracking features. Although research has designed and evaluated novel features for supporting parent-child collaboration with these wearables, less is known about how families naturally adopt and use these technologies in their everyday life. We conducted interviews with 17 families who have naturally adopted child-owned wearables to understand how they use wearables individually and collaboratively. Parents are primarily motivated to use child-owned wearables for children's long-term health and wellbeing, whereas children mostly seek out entertainment and feeling accomplished through reaching goals. Children are often unable to interpret or contextualize the measures that wearables record, while parents do not regularly track these measures and focus on deviations from their children's routines. We discuss opportunities for making naturally-occurring family moments educational to positively contribute to children's conceptual understanding of health, such as developing age-appropriate trackable metrics for shared goal-setting and data refection.
                Cover page: The Lived Experience of Child-Owned Wearables: Comparing Children's and Parents’ Perspectives on Activity Tracking
                • Article
                • Peer Reviewed
                UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2023)
                Recent large language models (LLMs) have advanced the quality of open-ended conversations with chatbots. Although LLM-driven chatbots have the potential to support public health interventions by monitoring populations at scale through empathetic interactions, their use in real-world settings is underexplored. We thus examine the case of CareCall, an open-domain chatbot that aims to support socially isolated individuals via check-up phone calls and monitoring by teleoperators. Through focus group observations and interviews with 34 people from three stakeholder groups, including the users, the teleoperators, and the developers, we found CareCall offered a holistic understanding of each individual while offloading the public health workload and helped mitigate loneliness and emotional burdens. However, our findings highlight that traits of LLM-driven chatbots led to challenges in supporting public and personal health needs. We discuss considerations of designing and deploying LLM-driven chatbots for public health intervention, including tensions among stakeholders around system expectations.
                  Cover page: Understanding the Benefits and Challenges of Deploying Conversational AI Leveraging Large Language Models for Public Health InterventionCreative Commons 'BY-NC' version 4.0 license
                  • Article
                  • Peer Reviewed
                  UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2016)
                  Many people struggle with efforts to make healthy behavior changes, such as healthy eating. Several existing approaches promote healthy eating, but present high barriers and yield limited engagement. As a lightweight alternative approach to promoting mindful eating, we introduce and examine crumbs: daily food challenges completed by consuming one food that meets the challenge. We examine crumbs through developing and deploying the iPhone application Food4Thought. In a 3-week field study with 61 participants, crumbs supported engagement and mindfulness while offering opportunities to learn about food. Our 2×2 study compared nutrition versus non-nutrition crumbs coupled with social versus non-social features. Nutrition crumbs often felt more purposeful to participants, but non-nutrition crumbs increased mindfulness more than nutrition crumbs. Social features helped sustain engagement and were important for engagement with non-nutrition crumbs. Social features also enabled learning about the variety of foods other people use to meet a challenge.
                    Cover page: CrumbsCreative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
                    • Peer Reviewed
                    UC Irvine Previously Published Works (2021)
                      Cover page: Opportunities and Challenges for Long-Term Tracking
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