Smartrings have potential to extend our ubiquitous control through their always available and finger-worn location, as well as their quick and subtle interactions. As such, smartrings have gained popularity in research and in commercial usage; however, they often concentrate on a singular or novel aspect of a smartring's potential. While with any emerging technology the focus on these individual components is important, there is a lack of broader empirical understanding regarding a user's intentions for smartring usage. Thus in this work, we investigate concrete and reported smartring usage scenarios throughout the daily lives of participants. During a two-week in-situ diary study (N = 14), utilizing a mock smartring, we provide an initial understanding of the potential tasks, daily activities, connected devices, and interactions for which augmentation with a smartring was desired. We further highlight patterns of imagined smartring use found by our participants. Finally, we provide and discuss guidelines, grounded through our found knowledge, to inform research and development towards the design of future smartrings.
Smartwatches enable not only the continuous collection of but also ubiquitous access to personal health data. However, exploring this data in-situ on a smartwatch is often reserved for singular and generic metrics, without the capacity for further insight. To address our limited knowledge surrounding smartwatch data exploration needs, we collect and characterize desired personal health data queries from smartwatch users. We conducted a week-long study (N = 18), providing participants with an application for recording responses that contain their query and current activity related information, throughout their daily lives. From the responses, we curated a dataset of 205 natural language queries. Upon analysis, we highlight a new preemptive and proactive data insight category, an activity-based lens for data exploration, and see the desired use of a smartwatch for data exploration throughout daily life. To aid in future research and the development of smartwatch health applications, we contribute the dataset and discuss implications of our findings.
Supporting eyes-free interaction, mobility and encumbrance, while providing a broad set of commands on a smartwatch display is a difficult, yet important, task. Bezel-to-bezel (B2B) gestures are valuable for rapid command invocation during eyes-free operation, however we lack knowledge regarding B2B interactions on circular devices during common usage scenarios. We aim to improve our understanding of the dynamics of B2B interactions in these scenarios by conducting two studies and a third analysis: First, we explore the performance of B2B in a seated position; second, we explore the effect of mobility and encumbrance on the B2B interaction; finally, we improve on the B2B accuracies by calculating features and utilizing machine learning. With the limited interaction capabilities on smartwatches and the importance of the scenario of use, we conclude with applications and design guidelines for improved utilization of B2B that enables effective smartwatch control while in common, mobile and eyes-free scenarios.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.