About CORE – Discover the COmpendium of RElatedness Technologies

CORE is a free-access, interactive database designed for researchers and designers, to explore relatedness technologies in a structured and engaging way. The comprehensive collection encompasses concepts and prototypes that have been explicitly designed to promote relatedness (i.e., emotional closeness, intimacy, and connectedness between people in a social relationship across distance). It includes a diverse set of technologies.

Inspiration and Insights for Designers and Researchers

CORE provides an accessible way to explore the diversity and trends in relatedness technologies and to navigate this field. Whether for inspiration, detailed exploration of specific topics like input modalities, strategies, or ethics, or finding relevant work, CORE is a comprehensive resource for you.

The CORE Database

• Currently contains 260 concepts and prototypes from 226 papers published in the ACM Digital Library between 2010 and May 2025.
• Technologies are described with key data and systematically categorized by target population, theoretical grounding, design, evaluation, and ethics.
• Relevant papers identified using PRISMA, a methodology for systematic literature reviews.
• Updated annually.

Updates to CORE

November 2025

The first update of the CORE database includes newly published papers from the ACM digital library between June 1, 2024, and May 31, 2025, identified using the same keywords (see Wenhart et al., 2024).

In the first screening step, three publications were excluded because they were "full books." In the second step, the titles of all 354 publications were examined, and 109 that were clearly off-topic were excluded. In the third step, two researchers screened the abstracts and titles independently according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria (see Wenhart et al., 2024). This yielded a list of 56 papers, which were then assessed through full-text reading. Eighteen publications were ultimately included in the corpus, containing 20 concepts or prototypes added to the CORE database.

One of the additional publications is a research paper providing a more detailed evaluation of a technology that was already included in the previous database. In total, the CORE database now contains 260 related technologies.