Affect Regulation Using Technology: Lessons Learned by Taking a Multidisciplinary Perspective

We share two challenges that emerged in our work to build, design, and evaluate vibrotactile technology to facilitate affect regulation. These challenges concern, respectively, the timing of interventions and the role of technology in initiating them. First, we challenge the Just-in-Time Adaptive Intervention (JITAI) framework in HCI for affect regulation, specifically the use of technology to identify when an intervention becomes necessary. Second, we discuss the issue of user agency when initiating an affect regulation intervention, and argue that the user should ideally be the one to initiate an intervention instead of the technology.