In recent years, the digital delivery of mindfulness-based interventions for anxiety and stress relief has gained popularity among the general population. However, there is a lack of research on how users navigate those specially designed mobile applications(apps) and how their mental health journeys may be shaped by the design processes that constitute their interactions with the app. Given the reach and scale of Headspace app's user base, there is an opportunity to study the design and user experience. Integrating the concept of technological affordances and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT-2), this study seeks to answer the following research question: How do the characteristics of the Headspace mobile app enable or constrain different aspects of the user’s mental health journey? The findings reveal that Headspace offers affordances such as accessibility, progress tracking, and privacy, which influence user engagement and experience. The affordances notably intersect with UTAUT-2, thereby providing a robust design to understand the sociotechnical dynamics of using digital mental health tools. Overall, this study provides insight into user experience and interpretation of affordances, demonstrating the relationship between design elements and individual perceptions that can iteratively inform digital experience.

This study examines the parallel platformization of health by analyzing how verified healthcare professionals present themselves and disseminate medical information on Douyin and TikTok. Through content analysis of videos published by 10 popular verified doctors on each platform and homepage analysis, as well as policy analysis of platform regulations on the healthcare industry, this study explores how platform infrastructure, business models, and governance influence the roles, interactions, and communication styles of healthcare professionals on Douyin and TikTok.

This talk examines how diabetic use of self-tracking continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) and diabetic data sensibilities that come from CGM use have been increasingly generalized to non-diabetic users and uses of CGM devices since 2021, when CGMs were approved in some international jurisdictions for use without requisite medical necessity. Communities of non-diabetic practice use the CGM to measure their glucose like diabetic users do, but in frameworks that both distance and re-center diabetes in their design and use. Just as diabetics learn to feel their numbers in relation to how CGMs datafy and visualize their glucose numbers over time, non-diabetic CGM users aim to measure, visualize, and develop a feel for their sugars like people with diabetes do: to develop diabetic-like “data gazes,” ways of seeing data about glucose that people with diabetes cultivate around the graphical visualizations of CGM data. CGM use by people without diabetes generalizes diabetic practice, technology, and sensibility, putting people with and without diabetes into newly configured, and often contentious, relations around their shared use of the CGM device. Based in analysis of social media marketing, online promotions, unboxing videos and a corpus of social media comments around CGM use by people without diabetes, this talk demonstrates how centrally chronic illness figures into the practices, routines and feel of quantified selfhood with the CGM, around the one chronic illness that stands in for managed chronic living more generally: diabetes.

This paper explores postdigital becoming through an auto-ethnography of period- and cycle tracking apps. For four months I track my cycle using three FemTech apps, initially aiming to gain self-knowledge and empowerment, as promised by these apps. Instead, the tracking makes me bored. Why is cycle tracking so boring? Why should we, from a feminist perspective, care? Inspired by these questions, I situate cycle tracking in a historical context and argue for its potential value as a feminist practice. In doing so, I draw on Rosi Braidotti’s (2002) new materialist theory of becoming, in order to explore the feminist subjects we could become through cycle tracking. I argue, that the empowering potential in cycle tracking lies in what it enables us to ”become,” and speculate what we could become with cycle tracking technology that fosters social understandings of menstruation, and feminist collectivities.