CoCo, the companion that connects you to wellness
Our health tracking technology aims to improve your wellbeing by suggesting personalised activities that help make the most out of your day
We can detect when you’re caffeinated, stressed, have consumed alcohol and even when your cat is interfering with your day!
Take Gabriel and his cat Pickle, he downloaded CoCo to help manage stress levels after a hypertension diagnosis
As an author, he spent a lot of time working in coffee shops writing his latest novel
After using CoCo, he noticed that he was often more stressed when working in the coffee shop and decided to follow CoCo’s advice to work from home
Now that he was working from home he could use CoCo’s IoT integration technology to automatically increase the heating and decrease his stress
As well as increase his bills and headaches from the caffeine withdrawal!
This also meant he could spend more time with Pickle
and see the impact he had on his heart every time he brought home a new friend!
Worried about his health Gabriel put Pickle up for adoption, leaving him warm, lonely and with hourly headaches, free to work on his book all thanks to CoCo!
Context-Aware Wearables, the last thing we need is a pandemic of stray cats
In case you hadn’t already guessed CoCo is a work of fiction
As described in the fictional trailer, CoCo is an AI powered wearable and application that detects when you are drunk, stressed and caffeinated with the aim of improving your wellness
Using design fiction as world building through the format of a fictional paper we could explore how people would use these sensors
and provoke discussion around whether these sensors should exist and what other sensors could exist before they are implemented in everyday technologies
The fictional paper discusses some of these points through a user study with different users of CoCo like Gabriel and his cat Pickle
Exploring these challenges through different user experiences we could highlight a range of benefits and problems with machine learning in health tracking systems, especially when encoding context
Some of these benefits could be the personalised notifications increasing an individual’s motivation to take care of their own health and wellbeing
such as one character Philip who used the stress notifications to remind him to relax by going for a run
Or as we saw in the trailer Gabriel’s awareness of his caffeine levels could temporarily decrease his stress levels
However, we could also see the many dangers of using these systems
many relating to the complexities of context-aware computing such as CoCo mistaking one user for being constantly drunk when she actually worked in a bar
or being able to tell the difference between professional and leisure activities
like Jason missing staff meetings to reduce stress which also had unintended consequences like a meeting with the headteacher that increased stress a lot more!
Or it could also be something much more severe like mistaking Mark’s speech impediment for drunkenness because of algorithmic bias
So what can we learn from using design fiction to explore the challenges with applying machine learning in context aware systems?
Firstly, how context is complicated not just modelling context but also the unpredictability of human behaviour in different situations
Secondly, how these models might be applied and used in near future technologies and systems,
especially for exploring many possible contexts where these sensors might be used
And given this why speculative and future-focused research such as design fiction should be used for exploring similar HCI challenges before these systems are implemented
Thank you for listening and any questions?