Overview of our research

The aim of the overall project is to develop a toolkit for supporting physical activity at home as part of the everyday routine. This will involve developing a set of design guidelines, some initial concepts for such home-based technologies and insights on case studies where such technologies are deployed. Through an iterative, user-centred design process we aim to identify user needs, attitudes and expectations to better understand how to design home physical activity technologies people trust and want to use. Read below about the main stages of our work.

Stage 1

Co-design workshops to understand user needs and gather the requirements for smart cues prototypes.

Stage 2

Iterative development and refinement of the prototypes and usability testing to ensure they meet users’ needs.

Stage 3

Home evaluation studies to identify logistical issues and explore how smart cues can affect the formation of new habits.

Publications

Beyond passive monitoring: a systematic review of tangible interactive devices that support home-based physical activity

2026

Encouraging home-based physical activity (PA) is increasingly important for public health. While smartphones and smartwatches are widely adopted, passive monitoring fails to effectively promote home exercise, providing basic metrics without meaningful feedback or user-preference alignment. Recent technological advances enable interactive, tangible devices designed for home PA interventions. We systematically reviewed 21 studies published since 2015 describing functional devices with physical components designed for stand-alone home use to analyse device categories, modalities, feedback mechanisms, and behaviour change techniques (BCTs). Our findings show a dominance of embedded systems that support strength and balance activities, visual-heavy feedback, limited layering of triggers, and a limited use of BCTs directly linked to habit formation. We offer design directions for tangible devices that support PA in home environments and promote durable behaviour change through emphasising stationary aerobic micro routines, layering prompts embedded in objects, and providing a mix of real-time and delayed feedback.

Wei, Scott, and Stawarz. 2026. Beyond passive monitoring: a systematic review of tangible interactive devices that support home-based physical activity. Presented at: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Barcelona, Spain, 13-17 April 2026. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2026. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 10.1145/3772318.3790580

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Fake it ’til you find it: Fabulating unseen participant dynamics

2025

Home technologies are designed primarily for one-to-one interactions, but their placement in the home often results in engagements with passive non-users. If we wish to design for these engagements, the difficulty then transitions to observing them – there are many home set-ups of which only some are easily visible and fewer still are easily recruitable. This paper explores the use of narrative fabulation to examine these engagements, constructing a multi-generational home scenario and examining the use of home technologies through concurrent first-person narratives: first from the perspective of the primary active user, and then through several passive non-users who face problems and inconveniences. This approach allows us to view the potential impacts of home technologies in multi-occupancy households, potentially identifying points of friction in uncommon household environments and resolving them before deployment into the real world.

Scott. 2025. Fake it ’til you find it: Fabulating unseen participant dynamics. Presented at: How do design stories work? Exploring narrative forms of knowledge in HCI, Workshop, CHI 2025, Yokohama, Japan. 

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