PneuExtensio: Designing Pneumatic-based Bodily Extensions to Facilitate Embodiment across Everyday Life Experiences

Bodily augmentations have been increasingly investigated by HCI researchers due to the associated benefits, such as accessibility, offering novel input space, and sensing environment. Most of these investigations have adopted a utilitarian perspective, providing impairment, mobility, and rehabilitation support. However, more recently a subset called bodily extensions has emerged that appears to also embrace experiential aspects. These bodily extensions physically extend the human body, going beyond traditional sensing and accessibility perspectives. Initial designs were mostly rigid, leading to a focus on short-term use, missing out on the opportunities for these bodily extensions to be integrated into everyday life. In our work, we build soft pneumatic-based bodily extensions that users can incorporate into their everyday lives. We detail the design and rationale behind these bodily extensions, along with the novel scenarios they enable. We share our insights from creating these systems and the associated user experiences from our field study with 48 participants, resulting in a design framework that will hopefully aid future designers in facilitating embodiment across everyday life through bodily extensions.