Grand Challenges around Designing Computers' Control Over Our Bodies

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.

💡 Research Summary

This paper addresses the emerging field in which computers directly actuate or assist human bodies through technologies such as electrical muscle stimulation, pneumatic actuators, shape‑changing displays, and vestibular stimulation. Recognizing that traditional HCI has treated interaction as a controller‑responder relationship, the authors argue that a shift toward “computer‑body integration” raises profound technical, design, user‑experience, and ethical questions. To surface these issues, a five‑day international workshop brought together 24 experts from academia and industry representing diverse domains (assistive technology, haptics, AI, wearable computing, etc.). Participants first presented challenges from their own work, which were recorded, clustered, and later refined into a set of 118 candidate problems across four categories: technology, design, user, and ethics. Through collective discussion these were distilled into a concise list of grand challenges that the community should aim to solve within roughly a decade. Key technical challenges include achieving real‑time, high‑precision, and safe actuation algorithms, as well as automating personalized calibration and error recovery. Design challenges focus on wearability, comfort, and social acceptability, while user‑centered challenges emphasize preserving agency, ensuring transparency of system intent, and accommodating bodily diversity. Ethical challenges call for robust consent mechanisms, data privacy safeguards, and legal frameworks that protect bodily sovereignty. The authors propose a research roadmap: short‑term work on reliable actuation and feedback loops, mid‑term efforts to standardize design guidelines and ethical codes, and long‑term development of societal and regulatory infrastructures. By articulating these grand challenges, the paper aims to steer future HCI research toward responsible, inclusive, and experiential approaches to computers that take control over our bodies.