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Breakaway: an ambient display designed to change human behavior

Published: 02 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

We present Breakaway, an ambient display that encourages people, whose job requires them to sit for long periods of time, to take breaks more frequently. Breakaway uses the information from sensors placed on an office chair to communicate in a non-obtrusive manner how long the user has been sitting. Breakaway is a small sculpture placed on the desk. Its design is inspired by animation arts and theater, which rely heavily on body language to express emotions. Its shape and movement reflect the form of the human body; an upright position reflecting the body's refreshed pose, and a slouching position reflecting the body's pose after sitting for a long time. An initial evaluation shows a correlation between the movement of the sculpture and when participants took breaks, suggesting that ambient displays that make use of aesthetic and lifelike form might be promising for making positive changes in human behavior.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '05: CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2005
    1358 pages
    ISBN:1595930027
    DOI:10.1145/1056808
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 02 April 2005

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    Author Tags

    1. design study
    2. interaction design
    3. lifelike motion
    4. product design
    5. ubiquitous displays

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    • (2024)Sitting Posture Recognition and Feedback: A Literature ReviewProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642657(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)Functional Design Requirements to Facilitate Menstrual Health Data ExplorationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642282(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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    • (2023)Unobtrusive interaction: a systematic literature review and expert surveyHuman–Computer Interaction10.1080/07370024.2022.216240439:5-6(380-416)Online publication date: Feb-2023
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