STAR :: Social and Technological Action Research Group

We are designing, developing, and deploying an innovative and feasible mobile solution for collecting infant and caregiver observations of daily living (ODLs), sharing these data with their clinical providers, and visualizing and summarizing these data for both the parents and clinicians caring for these children. This system, called Estrellita, has been shown to be helpful in preliminary pilot studies, and now we are expanding its capabilities and evaluating Estrellita in a longitudinal field deployment.

Food assistance outreach workers assist clients in applying for governmental nutrition assistance programs utilizing both offline and online application systems. These outreach workers make e-Government applications and services accessible to their client populations, by engaging in extensive human effort on behalf of their clients by negotiating information exchanges between governmental organizations and individual clients, fostering client and government relationships, and non-directly supporting and explaining underlying governmental processes to clients.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often demonstrate impairments in social skills. Social skills training is an effective way to develop age and functioning-level social skills to be used in a variety of situations. One successful curriculum that is currently in use in schools for teaching social skills to students with ASD is the Social Compass.

The death of a user does not result in the elimination of his or her account nor the profile’s place inside a network of digital peers. Friends use profiles postmortem to say last goodbyes, share memories, and coordinate funereal arrangements. These practices highlight three important themes for social networks and the representation of identity for their users: embodiment, representation, and temporality.

Project: Visual schedules and choice boards are tools used in current best practices for helping children with autism and other special needs. These non-verbal kids need help communicating their choices, understanding time and activities, and so on. We are working with Windows SmartPhone, Linux small displays, and large touchscreen-enabled platforms to develop solutions that ease [...]

What lessons can we draw from research on social movements to enable arger-scale actions via social media and social networking? We are researching the use of social media help to engender social interest groups and social movements operate on a large scale over time.

We investigate people’s concerns about recording technologies in everyday life. We apply the Concern for Information Privacy (CFIP) model to shed light on information privacy concerns towards pervasive and ubiquitous tracking and recording technologies and identify areas not well handled by this model and suggest avenues for future work.

Working with Girls Incorporated of Orange County, Microsoft Research, NCWIT, and Google, we have been able to conduct a series of classes on hands-on hacking.

There is no doubt that improving health care in the United States is a major focus for politicians on both sides of the aisle, corporations, and patient advocates. In many cases, information technology is hoped to be the solution to a variety of problems in health care…

Researchers: Leslie Liu and Gillian Hayes Personal health records have enormous potential to improve both health documentation and patient care. The introduction and adoption of these systems however, has have been relatively slow. We conducted three different types of studies focused on evaluating PHR systems: a traditional usability evaluation, clinician interviews, and a heuristic evaluation. [...]