Grand Challenges around Designing Computers' Control Over Our Bodies

TL;DR

The paper identifies grand challenges for designing computers that take control over the human body, framed through a five-day expert workshop that synthesizes tech, design, ethics, and user perspectives. It introduces three control viewpoints—interaction-oriented, goal-oriented, and embodied-experiential—to guide a comprehensive agenda that addresses wearability, calibration, transitions of control, safety, accountability, inclusivity, and social implications. The work advances a structured research program that integrates technical feasibility with experiential and ethical considerations, aiming to shape responsible development of on-body actuation, EMS, and related bodily-control systems. By outlining concrete challenges and future directions, the paper seeks to catalyze cross-disciplinary collaboration and a nuanced, human-centered trajectory for bodily-control technologies with real-world impact.

Abstract

Advances in emerging technologies, such as on-body mechanical actuators and electrical muscle stimulation, have allowed computers to take control over our bodies. This presents opportunities as well as challenges, raising fundamental questions about agency and the role of our bodies when interacting with technology. To advance this research field as a whole, we brought together expert perspectives in a week-long seminar to articulate the grand challenges that should be tackled when it comes to the design of computers' control over our bodies. These grand challenges span technical, design, user, and ethical aspects. By articulating these grand challenges, we aim to begin initiating a research agenda that positions bodily control not only as a technical feature but as a central, experiential, and ethical concern for future human-computer interaction endeavors.

Figures (5)

• Figure 1: Workshop process for identifying and refining grand challenges
• Figure 2: Photographs of collaborative efforts, including whiteboards, A2 sheets, and post-its. The visuals capture thematic discussions on topics like adaptation, user perspectives, societal values, and technical challenges, organized into categories such as methods, design, user, technology and society.
• Figure 3: From Inputs to Grand Challenges.
• Figure 4: Interaction-Oriented Perspective: (A) Goals lead to intentions, action specifications, and motor execution. The resulting changes in the environment generate sensory feedback that is perceived, interpreted, and evaluated against the goal, completing the perception–action cycle. (B) Humans, computational systems, and body-control agents each run their own perception–action loops. These loops interact through shared states and exchanged signals in a dynamic multi-agent system.
• Figure 5: Domains of cognition from a grounded perspective foregrounding cognition as perception-action coupling. Adapted from Barsalou2020. Left: Cognition emerges on a continuum of perception-action couplings (C/A/P) in mechanisms of senses (S), perceived body (PB), physical environment (PE) and social environment (SE). Right: the diagram illustrates the body-computer relationship mediated by dimensions of control leading to a dynamic negotiation around control. The C in the small square indicates the position of the computer with respect to the human from being external to fully integrated.