STAR :: Social and Technological Action Research Group

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.

We are designing, developing, and deploying an innovative and feasible mobile solution for collecting infant and caregiver ODLs, sharing these data with their providers, and visualizing and summarizing these data for both the parents and clinicians caring for these children. This system, FitBaby, has been shown to be helpful in prelimary pilot studies, and now we are expanding its capabilities.

Current Researchers: Michael Yeganyan, David Schramm, Meg Cramer, Monica Tentori and Gillian Hayes
Past Collaborators: Sen Hirano, Gabriela Marcu, Mohamad Monibi, David Nguyen
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, [...]

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.

Tools for electronic recording have become easier to use, less expensive, and more pervasive in recent years. As a result, just when people think they understand a technology enough to react to it – avoiding or embracing it – new technologies are invented and deployed, making it nearly impossible for even the most technologically savvy to keep up.

Youth are faced with complex choices about whether and how to share personal information online and offline. To inform these decisions, students need meaningful experiences with managing personal information and the technologies that are becoming central in everyday life.

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.

Currently, most hospitals use numeric pagers as a means of medical personnel communication. These numeric pagers require a person to call the pager number, type in a phone number to call back, and then wait for the receiving end to call back. Using these numeric pagers require medical personnel to share landline phones, creating a health risk for medical personnel and patients alike. We are interested in understanding the experience of clinicians with new mobile devices like mobile and smart phones.

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. The [...]