Pain Studies Lab’s InterLeaf: A Letter-Based Mobile Platform for Reflection, Connection, and Chronic Pain Support has been accepted to the poster track at CHI EA ’26: Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
InterLeaf is a mobile platform designed to support people living with chronic pain through reflective letter writing, comfort-item sharing, and intentional peer connection. The extended abstract responds to a gap in many digital health tools, which often focus on symptom tracking and behaviour monitoring while offering limited space for reflection, emotional expression, or meaningful connection.
The platform includes three main features: private or anonymously shared letters, a communal Grove of Solace for sharing meaningful comfort objects, and asynchronous chats that begin when users feel a strong connection with another person’s story.
The extended abstract also presents an AI tagging pipeline that identifies themes in user narratives, including symptoms, emotions, triggers, coping strategies, and body areas. In an offline evaluation using 250 synthetic letters, the system showed promise for cautious safety screening and interpretable tagging, while highlighting the need for confidence-aware design and user-editable tags.
Read more here.
Video: Watch the InterLeaf video
Paper: InterLeaf: A Letter-Based Mobile Platform for Reflection, Connection, and Chronic Pain Support
Conference: CHI EA ’26: Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
DOI: 10.1145/3772363.3798739
Authors: Sara Khalilipicha, Armin Froozanfar, Diane Gromala, Chris Shaw, Philippe Pasquier, Patricia Derbyshire
