Research project From Tracking to Hacking: Designing sleep technology for life outside norm schedules
Smartwatches, fitness trackers and other wearables follow every step we take, and every move we make. We even take them to bed and let them track our sleep. This project explores how people interact with technology and hack traditional sleep schedules in order to make their lives work.
The body is increasingly a central subject of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research and current technological development. This is apparent in the expansion of body trackers, such as the adaption of smartwatches and the increasing use of fitness trackers. This is largely driven by a move of giving users higher control over their health and well-being through cheap, ubiquitous self-tracking. Increasingly this includes the tracking and evaluation of sleep.
Yet, development has focused on traditional 8 hours-per-night schedules – overlooking the varied nature of people’s sleep. Such as sleep, much of our body practices are not solely a matter of health – but connected to the assemblages that is the complicated intricacies of everyday life.
This project aims to treat people as “expert users” of their own life. To carefully challenge the scope and perspective of existing technology, this work studies how people hack and shift their sleep to make their lives work. In the process of speculative sketching, prototyping, and participatory design, this work explores the design space of technology for changing body rhythms and how to design new interactions around body and life-tracking technology that increases the agency of the user.
This is Kasper Karlgren’s PhD project, with Donald McMillan and Barry Brown as supervisors.
Project description
The advent of a host of new consumer-grade bio-sensors, alongside different wearable technologies, has renewed a focus on the body as a site for technology use. New research around Somaesthetics and approaches to the intersection of health and technology, alongside a longstanding interest in embodiment in HCI, CSCW and related fields, has inspired new thinking about how technology can interact with and even be part of our bodily processes.
This work explores one such bodily process: sleep. Sleep is an interesting case in that it is partially under our conscious control but also affected by longer term patterns of activity and slow bodily processes. This work focuses on how we can design body tracking technology to increase the users’ agency over these body processes.
Many of recent academic efforts are built on an understanding of the users’ sleep through these bio-tracker readings. Sleep sensing has been a growing field, where sleep technology research has put much effort into exploring how and when people track their sleep, often by looking for less obtrusive ways to bio-track as to minimise disruption on sleep. This has been approached by leveraging smartphone sensors, smart textiles, personal radar systems, or even dreams.
However, earlier work has reported that users fail to see these visualisations as actionable; it is hard to know what one should do to improve one’s score. The trackers are often putting focus on sleep scores and efficiency metrics, and on hard to change variables, such as sleep phases, instead of caring for influenceable factors of sleep, missing to track actions such as naps, or just not providing support for those with irregular working shifts.
In response, this thesis takes the perspective of those who for various reasons want or need to take action over their sleep. I have explored the context of changing sleep practices through three studies: One with focus on the collaborative aspects of sharing of sleep hacks online, and another on the challenges of life with non-normative sleep schedules, and lastly one work on developing a prototype to schedule sleep around personal goals and requirements using reinforcement learning. This focus forms the starting point for an inquiry of how to build sleep technology with actions in focus.
Project members
Project managers
Kasper Karlgren
Doktorand
Donald McMillan
Universitetslektor
Barry Brown
Professor
