Three papers accepted at CHI 2025

Our team has three full papers accepted at CHI 2025, to be presented in Yokohama!

Le et al., CHI 2025

Ha’s paper discusses a multimodal EMA system that enables users to quickly report their activity either through a screen interaction or a voice interaction at high frequency and achieves high compliance.

μEMAs allow participants to answer a short survey quickly with a tap on a smartwatch screen or a brief speech input. The short interaction time and low cognitive burden enable researchers to collect self-reports at high frequency (once every 5-15 minutes) while maintaining participant engagement. Systems with single input modality, however, may carry different contextual biases that could affect compliance. We combined two input modalities to create a multimodal-μEMA system, allowing participants to choose between speech or touch input to self-report. To investigate system usability, we conducted a seven-day field study where we asked 20 participants to label their posture and/or physical activity once every five minutes throughout their waking day. Despite the intense prompting interval, participants responded to 72.4% of the prompts. We found participants gravitated towards different modalities based on personal preferences and contextual states, highlighting the need to consider these factors when designing context-aware multimodal μEMA systems.

Das Swain et al., CHI 2025

Vedant’s paper is on an LLM-based empathetic co-worker to help front-office workers with emotion regulation.

Client-Service Representatives (CSRs) are vital to organizations. Frequent interactions with disgruntled clients, however, disrupt their mental well-being. To help CSRs regulate their emotions while interacting with uncivil clients, we designed Care-Pilot, an LLM-powered assistant, and evaluated its efficacy, perception, and use. Our comparative analyses between 665 human and Care-Pilot-generated support messages highlight Care-Pilot’s ability to adapt to and demonstrate empathy in various incivility incidents. Additionally, 143 CSRs assessed Care-Pilot’s empathy as more sincere and actionable than human messages. Finally, we interviewed 20 CSRs who interacted with Care-Pilot in a simulation exercise. They reported that Care-Pilot helped them avoid negative thinking, recenter thoughts, and humanize clients; showing potential for bridging gaps in coworker support. Yet, they also noted deployment challenges and emphasized the indispensability of shared experiences. We discuss future designs and societal implications of AI-mediated emotional labor, underscoring empathy as a critical function for AI assistants for worker mental health.

Wu et al., CHI 2025

Siyi (from Prof. Dakuo Wang’s group) led a collaborative work on a multimodal system to support symptom monitoring and risk prediction of cancer treatment-induced cardiotoxicity.

Despite recent advances in cancer treatments that prolong patients’ lives, treatment-induced cardiotoxicity (i.e., the various heart damages caused by cancer treatments) emerges as one major side effect. The clinical decision-making process of cardiotoxicity is challenging, as early symptoms may happen in non-clinical settings and are too subtle to be noticed until life-threatening events occur at a later stage; clinicians already have a high workload focusing on the cancer treatment, no additional effort to spare on the cardiotoxicity side effect. Our project starts with a participatory design study with 11 clinicians to understand their decision-making practices and their feedback on an initial design of an AI-based decision-support system. Based on their feedback, we then propose a multimodal AI system, CardioAI, that can integrate wearables data and voice assistant data to model a patient’s cardiotoxicity risk to support clinicians’ decision-making. We conclude our paper with a small-scale heuristic evaluation with four experts and the discussion of future design considerations.