Adolescent Perspectives on Social Connectedness in Their Local Communities: Implications for the Design of Technologies to Promote Individual and Collective Wellbeing

ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare · 2026-04-27

Social connectedness refers to a sense of belonging, perception that others care for you, and experience of relationships with others as fulfilling. Research shows that social connectedness has numerous benefits to mental and physical health. Yet a defining paradox of the digital age is that, despite humans being more technologically connected than ever, we experience alarming levels of loneliness, disengagement, and perceived disconnection from one another. This study holistically addresses how we might design technologies toward the outcome of meaningful social connection. To this end, we conducted focus groups with preteens and teens to elicit their perspectives on how tangible social practices lead to the intangible feeling that one is socially connected to their local community. Our analysis identified four types of inter-related practices through which community members enacted social connectedness: rapport-building, reciprocal, restorative, and authentic. Understanding these practices will help us to avoid designing technologies that unintentionally distract, disengage, divide, or isolate people from one another. Attending to these practices can help us design and incorporate technologies into communities in ways that complement and even enhance how they naturally enact social connectedness.

What do we mean by social support? A systematic review of HCI research investigating and designing for social support

2026-04-13 · 1 citations

Meeting People Where They Are: Building Community-Centered Care with Smartphone-Facilitated Response to Overdoses

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2025-01-10 · 1 citations

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 members who engaged in community-based effort to reverse overdoses using a smartphone-based app in an Eastern United States (U.S.) city. Drawing from feminist ethics of care, we identify how the caring practices of community members extend from administering a medical intervention to building trust and support between the care receivers and caregivers in the case of opioid overdose response. Contrary to the predominant patient-centered care paradigm, we emphasize community-centered care, which acknowledges the resistance of individuals and attends to reallocating caring responsibility and building relationships within the community. Our results highlight how trust intersects with social ecologies of care in the highly stigmatized context of opioid overdose and that trustful and less hierarchical relationships are critical sources of care for groups experiencing marginalization. We discuss applying harm reduction principles in designing health technologies for substance use disorders. We also discuss research and design opportunities for community-centered design for marginalized individuals and community caregivers.

Defining terminology and outcome measures for evaluating overdose response technology: An international Delphi study

Drug and Alcohol Review · 2025-04-25 · 4 citations

INTRODUCTION: Various novel harm reduction services leverage technology to reduce the rising number of drug poisoning deaths, particularly among those who use drugs alone. There is significant variability in terminology and outcome measures in reporting these interventions, complicating efforts to build a comprehensive knowledge base. Thus, we conducted a Delphi study to establish consensus and heterogeneity in these metrics. METHODS: Panellists from three stakeholder groups (people who use drugs, virtual harm reduction service operators and academics) participated in a multi-round Delphi study. The first round included open-ended questions to propose items in three categories: terminology, demographic information and outcomes. Subsequent rounds included options from a previously conducted scoping review for consideration. Likert ratings were used to achieve consensus, with a 70% threshold. Final rounds involved ranking terminology that reached a consensus. RESULTS: Of 23 initial participants, 14 completed the fourth survey round. "Overdose response technology" was identified as the most appropriate term for these harm reduction technologies. This definition includes drug contamination alerts, overdose response hotlines and applications, wearable overdose detection technology and overdose detection tools. Fourteen demographic outcomes reached a consensus for data collection, including name or handle, neighbourhood, age, gender, past overdose experience, substance used, amount and route of use. Six service use outcomes were recommended: response type, service outcomes, morbidity and mortality, overdose events, responder arrival time and post-rescue care. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS: The study results are recommended to standardise terminology and guide future research and knowledge dissemination in the field, ensuring clear communication with a shared language.

Life and Work at Home

IEEE Pervasive Computing · 2024-07-01 · 1 citations

Trauma-Informed Social Media: Towards Solutions for Reducing and Healing Online Harm

2023-04-19 · 80 citations

Social media platforms exacerbate trauma, and many users experience various forms of trauma unique to them (e.g., doxxing and swatting). Trauma is the psychological and physical response to experiencing a deeply disturbing event. Platforms’ failures to address trauma threaten users’ well-being globally, especially amongst minoritized groups. Platform policies also expose moderators and designers to trauma through content they must engage with as part of their jobs (e.g., child sexual abuse). We consider how a trauma-informed approach might help address or decrease the likelihood of (re)experiencing trauma online. A trauma-informed approach to social media recognizes that everyone likely has a trauma history and that trauma is experienced at the individual, secondary, collective, and cultural levels. This paper proceeds by detailing trauma and its impacts. We then describe how the six trauma-informed principles can be applied to social media design, content moderation, and companies. We conclude by offering recommendations that balance platform responsibility and accountability with well-being and healing for all.

Attachment-Informed Design: Digital Interventions That Build Self-Worth, Relationships, and Community in Support of Mental Health

2023-07-10 · 7 citations

The design of digital interventions for mental health often overlooks the foundational belief in one’s own self-worth and related ability to develop close relationships with others. Attachment theory explains these interpersonal aspects, which have long been associated with positive mental health outcomes such as resilience when faced with adversity. We report on generative interviews with mentors experienced in supporting youth, as part of design work initiated by community leaders concerned about the traumatic effects of gun violence and systemic racism on local youth. These community leaders wanted to extend their existing mentoring efforts through digital technology. We identified attachment theory as the best fit for helping us understand how mentors are addressing trauma among youth, in ways that can inform how we design in support of these relationships and communities. We introduce attachment-informed design as a set of design principles that represent a novel approach to digital mental health interventions.

"Would I Feel More Secure With a Robot?": Understanding Perceptions of Security Robots in Public Spaces

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2023-09-28 · 17 citations

Robots are increasingly being deployed as security agents helping law enforcement in spaces such as streets, parks, or shopping malls. Unfortunately, the deployment of security robots is not without problems and controversies. For example, the New York Police Department canceled its contract with Boston Dynamics in response to backlash from their use of Digidog, an autonomous robotic dog, which sparked fears in the public. However, it is unclear to what extent affected communities have been involved in the design and deployment process of robots. This is problematic because, without input from community members in the processes of design and deployment, security robots are likely to not satisfy the concerns or safety needs of real communities. To gain deeper insight into people's perceptions of security robots - including both potential benefits and concerns - we conducted 17 semi-structured interviews addressing the following research questions: RQ1. What characteristics do people ascribe to security robots? RQ2. What expectations do people have about the function and role of security robots? RQ3. What are people's attitudes toward the use of security robots? Our study offers several contributions to the existing literature on security robots.

"Would I Feel More Secure With a Robot?": Understanding Perceptions of Security Robots in Public Spaces

University of Michigan Library · 2023-05-08 · 1 citations

Robots are increasingly being deployed as security agents helping law enforcement in spaces such as streets, parks, or shopping malls. Unfortunately, the deployment of security robots is not without problems and controversies. For example, the New York Police Department canceled its contract with Boston Dynamics in response to backlash from their use of Digidog, an autonomous robotic dog, which sparked fears in the public. However, it is unclear to what extent affected communities have been involved in the design and deployment process of robots. This is problematic because, without input from community members in the processes of design and deployment, security robots are likely to not satisfy the concerns or safety needs of real communities. To gain deeper insight into people’s perceptions of security robots—including both potential benefits and concerns—we conducted 17 semi-structured interviews addressing the following research questions: RQ1. What characteristics do people ascribe to security robots? RQ2. What expectations do people have about the function and role of security robots? RQ3. What are people’s attitudes toward the use of security robots? Our study offers several contributions to the existing literature on security robots.

Predictive Dispatch of Volunteer First Responders: Algorithm Development and Validation

JMIR mhealth and uhealth · 2023-11-28 · 4 citations

Background Smartphone-based emergency response apps are increasingly being used to identify and dispatch volunteer first responders (VFRs) to medical emergencies to provide faster first aid, which is associated with better prognoses. Volunteers’ availability and willingness to respond are uncertain, leading in recent studies to response rates of 17% to 47%. Dispatch algorithms that select volunteers based on their estimated time of arrival (ETA) without considering the likelihood of response may be suboptimal due to a large percentage of alerts wasted on VFRs with shorter ETA but a low likelihood of response, resulting in delays until a volunteer who will actually respond can be dispatched. Objective This study aims to improve the decision-making process of human emergency medical services dispatchers and autonomous dispatch algorithms by presenting a novel approach for predicting whether a VFR will respond to or ignore a given alert. Methods We developed and compared 4 analytical models to predict VFRs’ response behaviors based on emergency event characteristics, volunteers’ demographic data and previous experience, and condition-specific parameters. We tested these 4 models using 4 different algorithms applied on actual demographic and response data from a 12-month study of 112 VFRs who received 993 alerts to respond to 188 opioid overdose emergencies. Model 4 used an additional dynamically updated synthetic dichotomous variable, frequent responder, which reflects the responder’s previous behavior. Results The highest accuracy (260/329, 79.1%) of prediction that a VFR will ignore an alert was achieved by 2 models that used events data, VFRs’ demographic data, and their previous response experience, with slightly better overall accuracy (248/329, 75.4%) for model 4, which used the frequent responder indicator. Another model that used events data and VFRs’ previous experience but did not use demographic data provided a high-accuracy prediction (277/329, 84.2%) of ignored alerts but a low-accuracy prediction (153/329, 46.5%) of responded alerts. The accuracy of the model that used events data only was unacceptably low. The J48 decision tree algorithm provided the best accuracy. Conclusions VFR dispatch has evolved in the last decades, thanks to technological advances and a better understanding of VFR management. The dispatch of substitute responders is a common approach in VFR systems. Predicting the response behavior of candidate responders in advance of dispatch can allow any VFR system to choose the best possible response candidates based not only on ETA but also on the probability of actual response. The integration of the probability to respond into the dispatch algorithm constitutes a new generation of individual dispatch, making this one of the first studies to harness the power of predictive analytics for VFR dispatch. Our findings can help VFR network administrators in their continual efforts to improve the response times of their networks and to save lives.