Karthik Bhat

Screen use pervades daily life, shaping work, leisure, and social connections while raising concerns for digital wellbeing. Yet, reducing screen time alone risks oversimplifying technology’s role and neglecting its potential for meaningful engagement. We posit self-awareness—reflecting on one’s digital behavior—as a critical pathway to digital wellbeing. We developed WellScreen, a lightweight probe that scaffolds daily reflection by asking people to estimate and report smartphone use. In a two-week deployment with college students (\(\mathtt {N}\)=25) focused on generating formative insights, we examined how discrepancies between estimated and actual usage shaped digital awareness and wellbeing. Participants often underestimated productivity and social media while overestimating entertainment app use. They showed a 10% improvement in positive affect, rating WellScreen as moderately useful. Interviews revealed that structured reflection supported recognition of patterns, adjustment of expectations, and more intentional engagement with technology. Our findings highlight the promise of lightweight reflective interventions for supporting self-awareness and intentional digital engagement, offering implications for designing digital wellbeing tools.

Stepping into a caregiving role for an aging loved one often means navigating conflicting demands of daily life. While prior Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research has investigated tools to support the logistics of caregiving, less attention has been directed to boundaries: how caregivers manage them alongside other obligations. Through 15 semi-structured interviews with caregivers of older adults, we unpack caregivers’ boundary negotiation, examining how caregivers use boundaries to manage multiple responsibilities and how uncertainty about their roles shapes boundary negotiation. Employing “boundary ambiguity” as an analytical lens, our findings reveal how caregivers use strategies of internal reframing—how they think about their roles—and external negotiation—how they interact with others—to manage their unstable, permeable, and elastic boundaries in everyday life. We discuss how inherent, ongoing boundary ambiguity shapes caregivers’ experiences, concluding with design implications for digital technologies that enhance caregivers’ agency and support boundary negotiations for caregivers and care recipients.

Most personal wellbeing apps present summative dashboards of health and physical activity metrics, yet many users struggle to translate this information into meaningful understanding. These apps commonly support engagement through goals, reminders, and structured targets, which can reinforce comparison, judgment, and performance anxiety. To explore a complementary approach that prioritizes self-reflection, we design KRIYA, an AI wellbeing companion that supports co-interpretive engagement with personal wellbeing data. KRIYA aims to collaborate with users to explore questions, explanations, and future scenarios through features such as Comfort Zone, Detective Mode, and What-If Planning. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 college students interacting with a KRIYA prototype using hypothetical data. Our findings show that through KRIYA interaction, users framed engaging with wellbeing data as interpretation rather than performance, experienced reflection as supportive or pressuring depending on emotional framing, and developed trust through transparency. We discuss design implications for AI companions that support curiosity, self-compassion, and reflective sensemaking of personal health data.

As CSCW research increasingly engages with communities, sensitive topics, and participatory methods, the emotional and ethical labor carried by researchers demands greater attention. While care ethics, affective labor, and feminist methodologies have gained ground within CSCW, conversations around researcher care remain limited and often informal. This SIG will explore the challenges and support needed to undertake emotionally demanding research journeys, particularly given the increasing distress and conflict in the global geopolitical landscape. We invite researchers to reflect on and share practices, challenges, and imaginaries of care for ourselves and our collaborators, alongside our participants. By underscoring the importance of researcher care and fostering a supportive network, this SIG aims to strengthen the resilience of the CSCW community.

Screen use pervades daily life, shaping work, leisure, and social connections while raising concerns for digital wellbeing. Yet, reducing screen time alone risks oversimplifying technology's role and neglecting its potential for meaningful engagement. We posit self-awareness -- reflecting on one's digital behavior -- as a critical pathway to digital wellbeing. We developed WellScreen, a lightweight probe that scaffolds daily reflection by asking people to estimate and report smartphone use. In a two-week deployment (N=25), we examined how discrepancies between estimated and actual usage shaped digital awareness and wellbeing. Participants often underestimated productivity and social media while overestimating entertainment app use. They showed a 10% improvement in positive affect, rating WellScreen as moderately useful. Interviews revealed that structured reflection supported recognition of patterns, adjustment of expectations, and more intentional engagement with technology. Our findings highlight the promise of lightweight reflective interventions for supporting self-awareness and intentional digital engagement, offering implications for designing digital wellbeing tools.

Understanding the limitations and weaknesses of state-of-the-art models in artificial intelligence is crucial for their improvement and responsible application. In this research, we focus on CLIP, a model renowned for its integration of vision and language processing. Our objective is to uncover recurring problems and blind spots in CLIP's image comprehension. By delving into both the commonalities and disparities between CLIP and human image understanding, we augment our comprehension of these models' capabilities. Through our analysis, we reveal significant discrepancies in CLIP's interpretation of images compared to human perception, shedding light on areas requiring improvement. Our methodologies, the Discrepancy Analysis Framework (DAF) and the Transformative Caption Analysis for CLIP (TCAC), enable a comprehensive evaluation of CLIP's performance. We identify 14 systemic faults, including Action vs. Stillness confusion, Failure to identify the direction of movement or positioning of objects in the image, Hallucination of Water-like Features, Misattribution of Geographic Context, among others. By addressing these limitations, we lay the groundwork for the development of more accurate and nuanced image embedding models, contributing to advancements in artificial intelligence.

This workshop focuses on remote care and wellbeing as we transition into a world increasingly adopting hybrid lifestyles and modes of operation. Care and care work have predominantly been researched in traditionally in-person interpersonal contexts. The burgeoning uptake and incorporation of information and communication technologies towards remote care have created new workflows and resulted in emerging questions around the definitions and scope of care practice in response. The confluence of technological, sociocultural, geopolitical, and climatic realities of the current day brings into focus the need to unpack the idea of “care,” and the role that HCI researchers could play in creating equitable futures of remote and hybrid care. This workshop will focus on questions such as “What does holistic wellbeing look like in the era of hybrid caregiving?” and “How does environmental care factor into our research practice?” We invite researchers and practitioners from academia and industry in this workshop to reflect on these questions and advance the future of remote care work at CHI.

There has been a growing interest in reproductive health and intimate wellbeing in Human-Computer Interaction, increasingly from an ecological perspective. Much of this work is centered around women’s experiences across diverse settings, emphasizing men’s limited engagement and need for greater participation on these topics. Our research responds to this gap by investigating cisgender men’s experiences of cultivating sexual health literacies in an urban Indian context. We leverage media probes to stimulate focus group discussions, using popular media references on men’s fertility to elicit shared reflection. Our findings uncover the role that humor and masculinity play in shaping men’s perceptions of their sexual health and how this influences their sense of agency and participation in heterosexual intimate relationships. We further discuss how technologies might be designed to support men’s participation in these relationships as supportive partners and allies.

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human--Computer Interaction (HCI) research is increasingly investigating the roles of caregivers as ancillary stakeholders in patient-centered care. Our research extends this body of work to identify caregivers as key decision-makers and boundary actors in mobilizing and managing care. We draw on qualitative data collected via 20 semi-structured interviews to examine caregiving responsibilities in physical and remote care interactions within households in urban India. Our findings demonstrate the crucial intermediating roles family caregivers take on while situated along the boundaries separating healthcare professionals, patients and other household members, and online/offline communities. We propose design recommendations for supporting caregivers in intermediating patient-centered care, such as through training content and expert feedback mechanisms for remote care, collaborative tracking mechanisms integrating patient- and caregiver-generated health data, and caregiving-centered online health communities. We conclude by arguing for recognizing caregivers as critical stakeholders in patient-centered care who might constitute technologically assisted pathways to care.

The growing platformization of health has spurred new avenues for healthcare access and reinvigorated telemedicine as a viable pathway to care. Telemedicine adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic has surfaced barriers to patient-centered care that call for attention. Our work extends current Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research on telemedicine and the challenges to remote care, and investigates the scope for enhancing remote care seeking and provision through telemedicine workflows involving intermediation. Our study, focused on the urban Indian context, involved providing doctors with videos of remote clinical examinations to aid in telemedicine. We present a qualitative evaluation of this modified telemedicine experience, highlighting how workflows involving intermediation could bridge existing gaps in telemedicine, and how their acceptance among doctors could shift interaction dynamics between doctors and patients. We conclude by discussing the implications of such telemedicine workflows on patient-centered care and the future of care work.