Pedro Sanches

Umeå University | UMU · Department of Informatics

Malaria surveillance is a practice concerned with collection and analysis of data. This paper presents an ethnographical account of an international team of researchers producing data about malaria in the Zanzibar archipelago. We show that malaria is increasingly constituted by data, and inextricably interwoven with the practices of data workers us...

The Soma Bits are a prototyping toolkit that facilitates Soma Design. Acting as an accessible 'sociodigital material' Soma Bits allow designers to pair digital technologies, with their whole body and senses, as part of an iterative soma design process. The Soma Bits addresses the difficulty we experienced in past Soma Design processes-that articula...

Skin conductance is an interesting measure of arousal level, largely unfamiliar to most end-users. We designed a mobile application mirroring end-users’ skin conductance in evocative visualizations, purposefully made ambiguous to invite rich interpretations. Twenty-three participants used the system for a month. Through the lens of a practice-based...

We report on a soma design process, where we designed a novel shape-changing garment—the Soma Corset. The corset integrates sensing and actuation around the torso in tight interaction loops. The design process revealed how boundaries between the garment and the wearer can become blurred, leading to three flavours of cyborg relations. First, through...

We report on a somaesthetic design workshop and the subsequent analytical work aiming to demystify what is entailed in a non-dualistic design stance on embodied interaction and why a first-person engagement is crucial to its unfoldings. However, as we will uncover through a detailed account of our process, these first-person engagements are deeply...

Though seemingly straightforward and habitual, breathing is a complex bodily function. Problematising the space of designing for breathing as a non-habitual act pertaining to diferent bodies or situations, we conducted a soma design exploration together with a classical singer. Refecting on how sensors could capture the impact and somatic experienc...

Research in the use of ubiquitous technologies, tracking systems and wearables within mental health domains is on the rise. In recent years, affective technologies have gained traction and garnered the interest of interdisciplinary fields as the research on such technologies matured. However, while the role of movement and bodily experience to affe...

We devised a Soma Design curriculum with accompanying teaching approaches for a seven-week course at a technical university. In our analysis of students' design concepts and process accounts, we found that they had opened an unusually rich and aesthetically engaging design space. But we also noted how they sometimes struggled with processes such as...

In the last decade, the number of articles on HCI and health has increased dramatically. We extracted 139 papers on depression, anxiety and bipolar health issues from 10 years of SIGCHI conference proceedings. 72 of these were published in the last two years. A systematic analysis of this growing body of literature revealed that most innovation hap...

In the 1920s, Oskar Schlemmer, artist in the Bauhaus movement, created the Triadic Ballet costumes. These re-strict movement of dancers, creating new expressions. In-spired by this, we designed an interactive wire costume. It restricts lower body movements, and emphasizes arm movements spurring LED-light 'sparks' and 'waves' wired in a tutu-like co...

Movement-based interaction design is increasingly popular, with application domains ranging from dance, sport, gaming to physical rehabilitation. In a workshop at CHI 2016, a set of prominent artists, game design-ers, and interaction designers embarked on a research journey to explore what we came to refer to as "aesthetics in soma-based design". I...

Data produced by mobile networks are frequently presented as useful to understanding social phenomena related to human behavior. The risks associated with making use of massive datasets are often framed in terms of privacy, security, intellectual property, or liability. I show that the risks of mobile data sensing are not reducible to privacy, but...

A systemic model for making sense of health data is presented, in which networked foresight comple-ments intelligent data analytics. Data here serves the goal of a future systems medicine approach by explaining the past and the current, while foresight can serve by explaining the future. Anecdotal evidence from a case study is presented, in which t...

Producing personal informatics is to implicitly or explicitly take a political stance on a number of issues. However, designers do not necessarily—nor are they required to—reflect on the wider political and ethical consequences of the decisions they make. Starting from the proviso that design decisions of ICT systems have ethical and political dime...

Health data requires context to be understood. I show how, by examining two areas: self-surveillance, with a focus on representation of bodily data, and mass-surveillance, with a focus on representing populations. I critically explore how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) can be made to represent individuals and populations, and identi...

Information and communication technologies are not value-neutral tools that reflect reality; they privilege some forms of action, and they limit others. We analyze reports describing the design, development, testing and evaluation of a European Commission co-funded syndromic surveillance project called SIDARTHa (System for Information on Detection...

This paper deals with the implications of the socialness of private communication. Drawing upon ethnographic observations of first time mobile phone users in Rah, an island in Vanuatu, we revisit the debate on how the mobile phone reconfigures private and personal communication. Our observations show how the advent of the mobile phone disrupts and...

In this paper we discuss ethical challenges arising around IT supported interoperability in multi-agency emergency management and explore some methodological responses.

Location and mobility patterns of individuals are important to environmental planning, societal resilience, public health, and a host of commercial applications. Mining telecommunication traffic and transactions data for such purposes is controversial, in particular raising issues of privacy. However, our hypothesis is that privacy-sensitive uses a...

Location and mobility patterns of individuals are important to environmental planning, societal resilience, public health, and a host of commercial applications. Mining telecommunication traffic and transactions data for such purposes is controversial, in particular raising issues of privacy. However, our hypothesis is that privacy-sensitive uses a...

We have designed a stress management biofeedback mobile service for everyday use, aiding users to reflect on both positive and negative patterns in their behavior. To do so, we embarked on a complex multidisciplinary design journey, learning that: detrimental stress results from complex processes related to e.g. the subjective experience of being a...

When designing Affective Health, a mobile stress management tool using biosensors, we gradually understood how severely limited inferences can be when we move from laboratory situations to everyday usage. We also came to understand the strong connection between our subjectively perceived resources for dealing with stress and healing. Therefor...

We propose that the concepts of Time Geography be evaluated as a framework for use within location-oriented services. Originally conceived as a system to describe patterns in human migration, Time Geography is ideally suited for providing the common language and concepts necessary for dialogue within this evolving area. Location-oriented services h...

ABSTRACT This paper describes the starting points of how to design and build tools to help individual users track and monitor their presence on the web ,from the standpoints of individual ,privacy and identity monitoring. It concludes with an overview,technological barriers and,possible solutions for their resolution. Our design models represent fa...

There exists today a paucity of tools and devices that empower people to take control over their everyday behaviors and balance their stress levels. To overcome this deficit, we are creating a mobile service, Affective Health, where we aim to provide a holis- tic approach towards health by enabling users to make a connec- tion between their daily a...

Today’s fast-paced modern life motivates a need for tools and devices that support people in dealing with stress by helping them to control their daily behaviours. There is a vari- ety of emerging applications that track physiological data from the body associated with stress over periods of time by using biosensors. However, most of them remain pu...