Short Form submissions are reviewed through a Reviewed process, and receive light feedback from reviewers. Submissions must meaningfully address both interaction (i.e., Human-Centered Computing and Human-Computer Interaction) and Health. Work that falls outside the conference scope may be subject for desk rejection. This includes, for example, a purely technical AI system for detecting clinical conditions with no interactive component, or a solely clinical case description with little or no focus on interactive systems, technologies, or practices.

The criteria for evaluation are as follows:

• Contribution to the IH 2026 community: Does the work present contributions or ideas that will stimulate interesting conversation among IH attendees?
• Significance: Is there an IH audience, e.g., Health, HCI researchers, that would find this work influential and/or compelling?
• Originality: How does the work build on, or speak to, existing work in the Interactive Health area? 
• Validity: How well are the chosen methods described and justified within the submission?
• Clarity: Is the writing clear, coherent, and appropriately targeted to the IH audience? Does the submission adhere to all formatting requirements and the 5000 words limit (excluding references)?
• Ethics and Approval: If the work involves human participants, clinical data, patient-generated data, or sensitive health-related materials, does the submission clearly state whether ethics approval (e.g., IRB/REC) was obtained or not required? Is the ethics declaration appropriate, transparent, and consistent with community standards?

The submission should contain no sensitive, private, or proprietary information that cannot be disclosed at the time of publication. All submissions are considered confidential during review. All rejected submissions will be kept confidential in perpetuity. 

Desk reject criteria: 

• Clearly out of scope for the conference
• Contribution to both interaction (Human-Centered Computing and Human-Computer Interaction) and health is much too small given the length of the submitted paper
• Paper that is clearly unfinished or very sloppy: lots of typos, missing sections, missing references, formatting issues.
• Grossly insufficient details provided to demonstrate research and methodological transparency and clarity
• Not written in English.
• Failure to declare concurrent submissions that are closely related. If you have such a submission, you must include an anonymized version of that submission as a concurrent submission within PCS. The same rule applies if your submission is built directly on a project described in a paper that is currently under review or in press at other venues.

The corresponding author of a conditionally accepted paper has to follow the instructions on preparing and submitting a final version by the Publication-Ready Deadline. If the authors cannot meet these requirements by the Publication-Ready deadline, the venue chairs will be notified and may be required to remove the paper from the program. The publication-ready version has to generally follow the LaTeX and Word templates from ACM. On top of the ACM master template, submissions can be prepared following specific styles depending on the type of submission, such as pictorials and case studies. For specific template instructions for the publication ready version of your submissions, see the Publication Formats page. Should you need technical assistance, please direct your technical query to: shorts2026@ih.acm.org.

Authors of accepted submissions will receive short feedback on changes to be made to their Short Forms for the publication-ready deadline. They are encouraged but not required to make edits to their submissions before submitting publication-ready versions of the same.