Mohan Kumar

Shyama Sastha Krishnamoorthy Srinivasan, Mohan Kumar, Pushpendra Singh

Care is primarily a collective phenomenon, with a practice that involves sharing health and wellbeing information within a trusted "care circle" of family members and companions for sensemaking, interpretation, decision-making, and follow-through. However, current digital health tools and information systems are designed for individuals and primarily intended for Personal Health Informatics (PHI). This mismatch between collective practice and individualistic design creates new challenges for the proactive use of such systems in care settings and limits adoption, sustained engagement, and meaningful use. To examine how people practice collective care and how (if) they perceive, adopt, and integrate PHI systems for proactive care, we conducted a sequential mixed-methods study. Through an initial survey (n=87) and semi-structured interviews (n=22), we found that their practices involve collectively understanding, analyzing, and sensemaking health information. However, we also found that their use of existing systems to support such practices is constrained by factors at personal, relational, technological, and structural levels that evolve over time. To explore redesigning PHI toward "Collective Health Informatics", we conducted stakeholder-specific interviews (n=12), a follow-up survey (n=116), and co-design workshops (n=6) to understand the dynamics required for collective settings while retaining agency. Using a design probe evaluation (n=38), we refine a design vision for coordinated, trustworthy action across such care relationships. Our findings motivate CC-Proact, an operational map that translates ecological influences into three design levers: Agency, Elicitation, and Engagement. Using this map, our work empirically examines collective care practices and offers ten design recommendations for building responsible systems that proactively support collective care.

Pragya Singh, Ankush Gupta, Somay Jalan et al.

Emotion recognition from physiological signals has substantial potential for applications in mental health and emotion-aware systems. However, the lack of standardized, large-scale evaluations across heterogeneous datasets limits progress and model generalization. We introduce FEEL, the first large-scale benchmarking study of emotion recognition using electrodermal activity (EDA) and photoplethysmography (PPG) signals across 19 publicly available datasets. We evaluate 16 architectures spanning traditional machine learning, deep learning, and self-supervised pretraining approaches, structured into four representative modeling paradigms. Our study includes both within-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations, analyzing generalization across variations in experimental settings, device types, and labeling strategies. Our results showed that fine-tuned contrastive signal-language pretraining (CLSP) models (71/114) achieve the highest F1 across arousal and valence classification tasks, while simpler models like Random Forests, LDA, and MLP remain competitive (36/114). Models leveraging handcrafted features (107/114) consistently outperform those trained on raw signal segments, underscoring the value of domain knowledge in low-resource, noisy settings. Further cross-dataset analyses reveal that models trained on real-life setting data generalize well to lab (F1 = 0.79) and constraint-based settings (F1 = 0.78). Similarly, models trained on expert-annotated data transfer effectively to stimulus-labeled (F1 = 0.72) and self-reported datasets (F1 = 0.76). Moreover, models trained on lab-based devices also demonstrated high transferability to both custom wearable devices (F1 = 0.81) and the Empatica E4 (F1 = 0.73), underscoring the influence of heterogeneity. More information about FEEL can be found on our website https://alchemy18.github.io/FEEL_Benchmark/.

Pragya Singh, Ankush Gupta, Mohan Kumar et al.

Emotional and mental well-being are vital components of quality of life, and with the rise of smart devices like smartphones, wearables, and artificial intelligence (AI), new opportunities for monitoring emotions in everyday settings have emerged. However, for AI algorithms to be effective, they require high-quality data and accurate annotations. As the focus shifts towards collecting emotion data in real-world environments to capture more authentic emotional experiences, the process of gathering emotion annotations has become increasingly complex. This work explores the challenges of everyday emotion data collection from the perspectives of key stakeholders. We collected 75 survey responses, performed 32 interviews with the public, and 3 focus group discussions (FGDs) with 12 mental health professionals. The insights gained from a total of 119 stakeholders informed the development of our framework, AnnoSense, designed to support everyday emotion data collection for AI. This framework was then evaluated by 25 emotion AI experts for its clarity, usefulness, and adaptability. Lastly, we discuss the potential next steps and implications of AnnoSense for future research in emotion AI, highlighting its potential to enhance the collection and analysis of emotion data in real-world contexts.

Bofin Babu, Mohan Kumar

Content filtering in web browsers is a tedious process for most of the people, because of several reasons. By blocking JavaScript, Cookies and Popups, end users can ensure maximum protection from browser based attacks and vulnerabilities. In order to accomplish this, we build an extension for Google Chrome which allows users to have easy control over what they wish to recievce from a web page. We also build this extension in such a way that it remembers the choice of options made by the user for every URLs, thereby letting users create rules for websites they visit.