Current Researchers: Jed Brubaker, Janet Vertesti, Paul Dourish, Niraj Desai, and Gillian Hayes

The mass adoption of Social Networking Sites (SNS) includes the growing presence of representing individuals who are no longer alive. However, 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. Indeed, friends’ use of a user’s profile postmortem to say last goodbyes, share memories, and coordinate funereal arrangements is a well known, if not frequently discussed.

Focusing on death brings to bear three important themes for social networks and the representation of identity for their users: embodiment, representation, and temporality. Embodiment particularly concerns the way that data objects and digital representations “stand for” human bodies. It encapsulates issues of access, issues of ownership, issues of management, issues of presence, issues of personhood, and issues of participatory status, both at the technical level and at the social. Representation invokes the traditional considerations of online identity, the presentation of self, and the crafting of acceptable personas as well as consideration of the ways in which records are created with specific purposes and representations in mind. Representation relates to embodiment in that it speaks to the relationship that holds between the data object and the human body, but it incorporates too the active, purposive, strategic practices of re-present-ing, that is, of making something present again, with particular ends in mind. Temporality concerns the notion of “lifecycles” as it has been applied in system development—the circumstances under which digital systems come into being, are put to use, and are taken out of service. The life of a user and the life of that user’s data are frequently not the same, an issue particularly acute when considering the continuation of dead user profiles in SNS.

Research Team: Sen Hirano, Leslie Liu, Sunyoung Park, Natalie Rich, Sheba George (CDU), Dini Baker (EDAC/CHOC)

PIs: Gillian Hayes, Karen Cheng (CDU)

Premature birth is associated with long term health impairments including neurological and cognitive deficiencies, chronic lung disease, and altered growth patterns of lean, fat, and bone tissues. Furthermore, parents of premature infants may experience excessive stress, post-partum depression, and other challenges associated with the birth of and caring for their child.

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 preliminary pilot studies, and now we are expanding its capabilities. Candidate ODLs include length and weight of the baby, feeding and sleeping schedules, and self-reported data about infant well-being and caregiver stress.  We are using a participatory design approach that includes clinicians, parents, social workers, and other relevant stakeholders.  This work includes ongoing collaboration with the UCI Medical Center Department of Pediatrics and Information Services Department to overcome clinical and technical challenges in our design, development, and evaluation as well as in planning for long-term impacts to the clinical workflow.

Watch a talk Gillian gave at Microsoft Research that covers some of the autism and FitBaby work:  http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=121512

Check out our posts on the Robert Wood Johnson Project HealthDesign Blog:

The relationship between ADLs and ODLs (this one is in Spanish too!)

Are there ODL’s in Diapers?

An introduction to our team

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, and so on. We are working with Windows SmartPhone, Linux small displays, and large touchscreen-enabled platforms to develop solutions that ease these burdens, provide logging and visualizations of data, and help automate some of the features of using these communication techniques.

We are also investigating how novel recording technologies, like the Microsoft SenseCam can be used to augment communication between non-verbal children with autism and their caregivers – including both parents and teachers.

Watch a talk Gillian gave at Microsoft Research that covers some of the autism and FitBaby work:  http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=121512

This work is supported in part by technical assistance and equipment through a collaboration with Microsoft Reserach Cambdridge.

This work is supported by AutismSpeaks Innovative Technologies For Autism program, a generous equipment donation from Nokia Research Palo Alto, and an NSF CAREER award.

The vSked and SenseCam for Autism projects will be presented at IMFAR 2008 in Chicago.

This work was presented at IDC as a poster at the main conference and at the Design for Children with Special Needs Workshop:

The vSked and SenseCam for Autism projects will be presented at IMFAR this year in Chicago.

This work was presented at IDC as a poster at the main conference and at the Design for Children with Special Needs Workshop:

vSked: Interactive Visual Scheduling Systems
Gillian R. Hayes
David Nguyen
Michael Yeganyan
Sen Hirano
Gabriela Marcu

SenseCam
Gillian R. Hayes
Gabriela Marcu

Mocotos:  Mobile Communications Tools for Children with Special Needs
Mohamad Monibi
Gillian R. Hayes

Interactive and Intelligent Visual Communication Systems
Gillian R. Hayes
Donald J. Patterson
Mohamad Monibi
Sam Kaufman

This work was also presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research as a poster:

Design of Interactive Visual Scheduling Systems
Sam Kaufman
Donald J. Patterson
Gillian R. Hayes

Research Team: Jed Brubaker, Ellie Harmon

PIs: Paul Dourish, Melissa Mazmanian

This project is directly concerned with issues of scale in social-computational systems. How can we exploit the power of contemporary networks to bring people together to act and operate at scale? In particular, can we draw lessons from sociological investigations of social movements to turn current interests in social media and social networking into larger-scale actions? In his book on “smart mobs,” Rheingold (2002) documents the role of mobile technologies as coordinative tools in large-scale social action; although in most of the cases he documents, technology is used to support real-time coordination of existing interesting groups. Our question is, can social media help to engender those social interest groups and social movements on a large scale over time?

We are performing a a mixed-method investigation of social-computational systems, combining:

• The deployment and iterative refinement of a prototype technology for personal reflection in environmental sustainability, designed along lines suggested by research in social movements and media discourse;
• Quantitative assessment of the growth and development of participation in the communities linked by this system and relations to the structural properties of social networks and temporal aspects of information flow;
• Qualitative examination of the processes of identification with and enrollment into a social movement through the sharing of participation and resources for situating oneself within.

Current Researchers: David Nguyen, Alex Bretana, and Gillian Hayes

Past Collaborators: Gabriela Marcu, Brian Sone, Aurora Bedford, Gillian Hayes, Khai Truong (University of Toronto), James Scott (Microsoft Research), and Marc Langheinrich (ETH Zurich)

Project: 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.

During design and initial product introduction, many different stakeholders make important choices that affect the ways in which these technologies might be perceived, used, and sometimes rejected. However, no matter what choices these stakeholders make, those people destined to encounter these technologies still choose to reject, live with, or appropriate these technologies based on their own understanding of them. Knowledge of how people make decisions about recording technologies based in both technical and social influences is critically missing today. This project contributes to ongoing research in privacy and security, ubiquitous computing, and technology and policy studies.

This work is supported in part by the collaboration with Microsoft Research Cambridge.

A recent paper from this work will be presented at Ubicomp 2008:
An Empirical Investigation of Concerns of Everyday Tracking and Recording Technologies
David H. Nguyen
Alfred Kobsa
Gillian R. Hayes

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.

We will create an interactive exhibit called “Identity Detectives” through which children (K-6) will construct knowledge about personal information to encourage “safe, legal, and responsible use of information and technology” (www.iste.org).

We hope to install this exhibit at a location like the Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, California. This museum—founded to provide “hands-on” learning experiences involving science, math, and technology—holds over 100 interactive exhibits, where visitors learn about myriad scientific concepts. Students of all ages engage with exhibits and construct meaning about scientific concepts along with families and school groups.

The center is an ideal site for a new technology-driven exhibit. Many exhibits already contain novel technologies to support interactions necessary for in-depth learning about science. However, exhibits about technology are not as prevalent.

To build conceptual understanding of personal information, students will:
• Recognize biological and cultural identifiers
• Explore how identity makes each person unique and a community diverse

To learn about privacy and security in technology, students will:
• Engage with online information solicitation
• Interact with tracking and recording technologies (e.g., RFID, biometrics, bar codes)

The exhibit provides students opportunities to establish respect for personal information—the foundation for responsible, informed sharing. Combining technological knowledge and character-building activities, this experience is an alternative to the reactionary stance usually taken toward perceived and actual risk to youth safety.

This work enables evaluation of new immersive, tactile, and collaborative learning experiences. The proposed exhibit will strengthen understanding of the interactions students have with materials, peers, and educators in a constructivist environment. Findings from this work will influence the design of learning technologies to reflect, support and strengthen these interactions.

Please comment on our work at the MacArthur Digital Learning competition http://www.dmlcompetition.net/pligg/story.php?title=544#c1037

Girls get to “play engineer” by rotating through four roles each class period and wearing a button that says who they are and the great things they can do!

Multi-level mentoring includes professors working with college students working with high school students working with middle school girls!  We are all there together as a team, figuring things out.  Everyone has someone they can learn from and everyone has someone to mentor. In this way, we are able not only to introduce girls to technology but also to reinforce the interest in teenagers and young adults.

Special thanks to Barb Erickson for her guidance on this project as well as to Microsoft Research, NCWIT, and Google for their support.  And of course, thanks so much to Girls Inc, Sarah Drislane, and the ladies of WICS for their continued hard work!

Marcu, G., Kaufman, S.J., Lee J.K., Black, R.W., Dourish, P., Hayes, G.R., Richardson, D.J.  Design and Evaluation of a Computer Science and Engineering Course for Middle School Girls.  Proc SIGCSE 2010.

Researchers: Leslie Liu, Jed Brubaker, Melissa Mazmanian, Scott Rudkin, and Gillian Hayes

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.

The MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas currently gives all physicians a BlackBerry instead of numeric pagers. The University of California, Irvine Medical Center will also soon deploy VoIP phones with texting capabilities to certain medical personnel. Using both these sites, we would like to understand the different technologies that allow for more information flow than what the numeric pager allows and understand the adoption and use of these technologies in a hospital setting, especially in the realm of “quality patient care”. We must also look at the medical staff’s perception on whether they believe that these smart/mobile phones actually increase, and therefore improve, the communication, thus inherently improving patient care as well.

Student Researchers: Jed Brubaker, Leslie Liu, Sunyoung Park, Chris Combs, So young Li, Sidney Harrison

PIs: Gillian Hayes, Karen Cheng (CDU), Sheba George (CDU), Gene Spiritus (UCI MC), Sherrie Kaplan (UCI Public Health). Yunan Chen

Project: 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, such as improving efficiency, patient safety, accountability, billing, and more.

However, development and implementation of large-scale information systems, like electronic medical records (EMR), often require expertise that hospitals and clinics may not have and substantial financial investments that would only be recouped after many years. To successfully implement large-scale health information systems, such as EMRs, we must understand the human processes underlying their implementation, rather than the technological aspects only. Because the evaluation of large-scale health information systems can be incredibly complicated, most evaluations, to date, have been limited in time and scope. Our research team has a unique opportunity to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the implementation of a large-scale health information technology system in a major research and teaching medical center

This is focused on:

1)    understanding the human-centered and organizational issues of the records transition process;

2)    identifying and evaluating user-level facilitators and barriers to EMR adoption and acceptance; and

3)    identifying and evaluating the organizational factors in adoption and acceptance of EMR.

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 results of these evaluations demonstrate that a combination of usability, functionality, and socio-cultural influences are impeding PHR adoption and use. They also demonstrate that heuristic evaluation, using modified heuristics, can be used to find many, although not all, of the challenges to use of particular healthcare technologies.

Publications:

Liu, L.S. and Hayes, G.R. Evaluation the Usefulness and Usability of Collaborative Personal Health Record Systems. CSCW Research in Healthcare:  Past, Present, and Future. CSCW2010 Workshp. Savannah, GA. February 2010.