Hi! I’m Kymeng Tang.
Today I’m going to present my research on the design and evaluation of a virtual reality simulation addressing the lived experience of breastfeeding.
This work has been done in collaboration with my co-authors, Kathrin Gerling, and Luc Geurts.
Breastfeeding brings many health benefits for parents and children but the process can be very challenging.
Antenatal education promises to equip parents with the understanding about the feeding process.
However, the current approach taken by the antenatal education tends to focus on promoting breastfeeding,
for example, by casting breastfeeding as an instinctive and trouble free process
while making little references to the lived experience itself.
As a results, parents do not gain enough insights into the feeding process,
leading to surprises when they are confronted with the reality of breastfeeding.
Within the HCI research community, there are efforts in addressing some of barriers to breastfeeding.
For example, there are apps that help parents find suitable nursing spots in public, facilitate breast milk donation and provide automated first-line of support.
More recently, there is a growing body of research that recognizes the relevance of the lived experience of parents in technology design.
Here, prior work has not explored how insights into the lived experience can be integrated into technology design.
We see an opportunity for leveraging Virtual reality in this space
because VR has the potential of immersing users in experiences that are otherwise inaccessible.
Building on this potential, This work aims to capture the lived experience of breastfeeding parents and explore how it can be conveyed using VR.
Our work aims to answer two research questions:
What design considerations need to be made when creating interactive simulations to convey the lived experience of breastfeeding and its associated challenges?
How do parents and parents to be perceive an interactive simulation of breastfeeding, and what is its potential for antenatal education?
Our work was structured into three phases.
In the first phase, we leveraged an Oculus rift VR headset, a leap motion hand tracking controller and tangible representations of a baby
to create an experience prototype that showcases the potential of VR.
Here, we attached the leap motion to the front of the VR headset to track the users hands
and we also fixed a VR controller to the tangible representation of the baby to track the position of the tangible baby in vr space.
This enables meaningful hand interactions with a virtual baby that we present in VR.
We crafted two breastfeeding settings, each hint at different level of influences of social and environmental factors on the feeding process.
We then demonstrated this prototype in online design workshops with 19 participants.
In each workshop sessions, we invited participants to take part in 4 design activities:
a drawing task reflecting how participants see themselves in breastfeeding settings, a semi-structured interview, moodboarding and storyboarding of breastfeeding scenarios.
Using thematic analysis, we crafted two themes from the data.
Our data suggests that parents need to embrace the asymmetry in parental roles in their breastfeeding journey,
for instance, partners need to acknowledge that breastfeeding support can be nuanced and doesn’t have to involve infant feeding.
In theme 2, there is a consensus among parents that the process of feeding a child involves uncertainties
and that they need to be emotionally resilient, and adapt their expectation of the process and the practicality of feeding a child.
From the workshops, we’ve collected visual artefacts that helped us iterate on our simulation.
In the revised simulation, users can experience the uncertain process of latching a baby and nursing in three built environments with and without presence of other people.
In phase III, we leveraged the revised simulation to engage 10 participants in a hand-on experience followed by a semi-structure interview probing about their perspectives.
Through thematic analysis, we crafted two themes:
In theme 1, our data suggests that the simulated experience triggers a flash back to memories in the early days of parenthood
and prompted reflection on the experience that breastfeeding parents go through.
We noticed instances in which the simulation triggered emotional responses as well.
Here, our simulation elicited the complexity of the lived experience,
for example, by teasing out the uncertainties and difficulty in the latching process, and highlighting the importance of support, particularly from partner.
Despites this potential, there exist instances in which the participants’ expectations do not align with the features provided by the simulation,
and we refer them as micro-frictions. For instance, micro-friction caused by the look and feel of the simulation,
the lack of interactivity with respect to the breastfeeding process and with the simulated agents,
and the absence of tangible or haptic feedback.
Drawing from our findings, we can conclude that simulation of the lived experience needs to convey a nuanced picture and balance the positive and challenging aspects of breastfeeding.
This way, simulated experiences can contribute to the reflection without overwhelming users with challenges or discourage breastfeeding.
In addition, it is particularly important to be aware of relevant customizations to suit individual experiences and to avoid creating a disconnect between simulation and reality.
In terms of users perspective towards the simulation, participants noted that the simulation was engaging and that it sparked reflection
and highlighted challenges of breastfeeding but not in a discouraging way.
Further, they suggested that it has the potential of supplementing antenatal education by giving a glimpse at the lived experience,
enabling exploration of the wider challenges but not much in teaching the technicalities of breastfeeding.
Here, we demonstrated that it is possible to design an interactive simulation that provoke reflection,
in other words, a simulation that probes personal experiences and questions the initial assumption about the lived experience.
However, our work contradicts common game design practices which often strive for realism and provides guidance, explicit goals as opposed to nuanced and vague experiences.
This is in line with the work of Khaled about open ended simulation that prioritizes questions over answers.
We argue that the vagueness allows users’ imagination to develop, creating a space for meaningful reflection.
While it is possible to capture the lived experience and present it in a simulation, there is a number of challenges that future work need to address.
First, the sensitive nature of breastfeeding makes some aspects of nursing inappropriate to convey,
for instance, the simulation of pain or an overwhelmingly challenging experience that might discourage breastfeeding.
Second, the uncertainty experienced by the participants led to micro-frictions, which participants suggested that it could be resolved by providing in-simulation feedback akin to what is provided in games.
However, we would like to note that the real-world breastfeeding comes with the same uncertainty, and is in fact a challenging aspect for new parents.
And finally, it is essential to recognize the extent of subjectivity of the co-designers and researchers that transpires into the virtual world as it potentially reflects the societal stereotypes and norm.
To reduce the risk, we therefore recommend offering a high degree of customizations that can mirror the users’ reality.
We hope that our work can encourage future development of experiential technology that supplements existing efforts in antenatal education.
Please refer to our full paper for additional and more nuanced research insights. 70 00:07:43,170 --> 1193:10:30,456 Thank you