Getting the right amount of high quality sleep is crucial for overall health and wellbeing, and pervasive and ubiquitous computing technologies have shown promise for allowing individuals to track and manage their sleep quality. However, sleep technology research has traditionally focused on individual-level solutions. In this paper, we elucidate social requirements for family sleep technologies. We take a family informatics approach to sleep, through an in-home interview study with 10 families with young children. We describe families’ current practices, values, and perceived role for technology, showing that sleep technology has many opportunities beyond individual-level tracking. We also provide design dimensions and implications for family-based sleep technologies, especially the potential for technologies that support family activities and rituals, encourage children's independence, and provide comfort.

Informal caregivers, such as close friends and family, play an important role in a hospital patient's care. Although CSCW researchers have shown the potential for social computing technologies to help patients and their caregivers manage chronic conditions and support health behavior change, few studies focus on caregivers’ role during a multi-day hospital stay. To explore this space, we conducted an interview and observation study of patients and caregivers in the inpatient setting. In this paper, we describe how caregivers and patients coordinate and collaborate to manage patients’ care and wellbeing during a hospital stay. We define and describe five roles caregivers adopt: companion, assistant, representative, navigator, and planner, and show how patients and caregivers negotiate these roles and responsibilities throughout a hospital stay. Finally, we identify key design considerations for technology to support patients and caregivers during a hospital stay.

Computer-supported fitness interventions for adolescents have the potential to improve adolescents’ attitudes and perceptions about physical activity through peer influence and interpersonal accountability. Past research has explored the potential of interventions based on competition and social-comparison mechanisms. We present a new approach: school-based, pervasive social fitness systems. We describe one such system: StepStream, a pedometer-based microblog we designed and deployed for four weeks with 42 US middle school students. StepStream users improved their attitudes about fitness and increased their sense of social support for fitness. The least-active students also increased their daily activity. We show that our school-based social fitness approach performed comparably in attitude and behavior change to more competitive or direct-comparison systems. These results expand the strategies available computer-supported fitness interventions. Our school-based social fitness approach to everyday adolescent health shows the potential for social computing systems to positively influence offline health behaviors in real-world settings.