Kenton O'Hara

Abigail Sellen

Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze

Cathy Craig

Cecily Morrison

Within the context of healthcare, there has been a long-standing interest in understanding the posture and movement of the human body. Gait analysis work over the years has looked to articulate the patterns and parameters of this movement both for a normal healthy body and in a range of movement-based disorders. In recent years, these efforts to understand the moving body have been transformed by significant advances in sensing technologies and computational analysis techniques all offering new ways for the moving body to be tracked, measured, and interpreted. While much of this work has been largely research focused, as the field matures, we are seeing more shifts into clinical practice. As a consequence, there is an increasing need to understand these sensing technologies over and above the specific capabilities to track, measure, and infer patterns of movement in themselves. Rather, there is an imperative to understand how the material form of these technologies enables them also to be situated in everyday healthcare contexts and practices. There are significant mutually interdependent ties between the fundamental characteristics and assumptions of these technologies and the configurations of everyday collaborative practices that are possible them. Our attention then must look to social, clinical, and technical relations pertaining to these various body technologies that may play out in particular ways across a range of different healthcare contexts and stakeholders. Our aim in this book is to explore these issues with key examples illustrating how social contexts of use relate to the properties and assumptions bound up in particular choices of body-tracking technology. We do this through a focus on three core application areas in healthcare—assessment, rehabilitation, and surgical interaction—and recent efforts to apply body-tracking technologies to them.

Body Tracking in Healthcare

Steve Harrison

Carman Neustaedter

New technologies are radically changing the way that families connect with one another: we can text our teenagers from work, eat dinner with far-away parents via video link, and instantly upload and share photos after a family day out. Whether we are bridging time or distance, and whether we are enhancing our closest relationships or strengthening the bonds of extended family, as computer technologies alter the communication landscape, they in turn are changing the way we conduct and experience family life. This state of the art volume explores the impact of new communication systems on how families interact – how they share their lives and routines, engage in social touch, and negotiate being together or being apart – by considering a range of different family relationships that shape the nature of communication. Composed of three sections, the first looks at what is often the core of a ‘family’, the couple, to understand the impact of technology on couple relationships, communication, and feelings of closeness. The second section studies immediate families that have expanded beyond just the individual or couple to include children. Here, the emphasis is on connection for communication, coordination, and play. The third section moves beyond the immediate family to explore connections between extended, distributed family members. This includes connections between adult children and their parents, grandparents and grandchildren, and adult siblings. Here family members have grown older, moved away from ‘home’, and forged new families. Researchers, designers and developers of new communication technologies will find this volume invaluable. Connecting Families: The Impact of New Communication Technologies on Domestic Life brings together the most up-to-date studies to help in understanding how new communication technologies shape – and are shaped by – family life, and offers inspiration and guidance for design by making clear what families need and value from technological systems.

The Impact of New Communication Technologies on Domestic Life

Connecting Families

Abigail Sellen

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