Research Team: Sen Hirano, Karen P. Tang, Dini Baker (EDAC/CHOC), Marni Nagel (CHOC)
Past Collaborators: Monica Tentori, Leslie Liu, Sheba George (CDU)

PIs: Gillian R. 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 called Estrellita. This system is an automated capture and access tool that allows parents of premature infants to capture relevant information of their newly born child and share it with their healthcare providers, close relatives, and friends.

Estrellita includes two interfaces: a mobile application (Figure 1) and a web-based clinical interface (Figure 2). Using the mobile application, users can record observations of daily living (ODLs) for the infant and caregiver, share these data with clinical providers, and visualize past recorded ODL data. Through the website, healthcare providers can interact with the caregiver and keep abreast with the infant’s ODLs through a series of simple visualizations and data summaries.

Figure 1. Screenshots of Estrellita mobile application: main overview screen (leftmost), input screen for recording infant’s weight information (second from left), inbox for exchanging messages between caregivers and clinicians (second from right), a widget placed on the phone’s home screen (rightmost).

Figure 2. Screenshots of Estrellita’s web interface.

The mobile application allows caregivers to update their baby’s health information (Figure 1, leftmost), consult system-generated or clinical-generated warnings (Figure 1, second from the left), and update data about their own health and well-being (Figure 1, second from the right). Estrellita uses a widget to provide a glanceable view of their data and a quick way to access previously recorded information (Figure 1, rightmost). Caregivers can also flag data points that are troubling them so they can discuss them later with their clinicians.

The web-based interface allows clinicians to consult patient information through a dashboard-like interface (Figure 2). Representations of the patient’s data must be made accessible to caregivers as well as to healthcare professionals. These representations include both alerts and visualizations at levels appropriate for both caregivers and healthcare providers. The Estrellita website also allows caregivers and healthcare professionals to exchange messages with one another.

We are currently in the process of evaluating this system in a public clinic at Orange County, CA, USA.

This work is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

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

• Interpreting the Absence of Data (Nov ’11)
• The Challenges of Locating Parents of Preterm Infants (Oct ’11)
• Creating a Better World for Premature Infants (Sep ’11)
• Observing Fussy Babies and Their Fussy ODLs (Aug ’11)
• Using Cell Phones to Improve the Health of Babies and Children Around the World (Jul ’11)
• What’s in a Name? (Mar ’11)
• FitBaby on Cutting Edge of Affiliation Between University and Hospital (Dec ’10)
• A Reminder of the Important Work We Do (Oct ’10)
• Action Research: A cyclical intensity for sustainable social change (Sep ’10)
• In Assimilating ODL, Data Personal Experience Plus an Open Mind Equals More Effectiveness (Aug ’10)
• Strengthening Parent-Infant Bonds (Jul ’10)
• The relationship between ADLs and ODLs (this one is in Spanish too!) (Jun ’10)
• Are there ODL’s in Diapers? (Apr ’10)
• An introduction to our team (Mar ’10)

Recent publications and talks:
Tang, K.P., Cheng, K.G, Hirano, S., Nagel, M., Baker, D., and Hayes, G.R. (2011) Addressing the Design Challenges for a Clinically-Informed Data Capture Tool Targeted for Caregivers of Premature Infants. In Proceedings of Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH 2011), 14-18.

Liu, L.S., Hirano, S.H., Tentori, M., Cheng, K.G, Park, S., and Hayes, G.R. (2011) Improving communication and social support for caregivers of high-risk infants through mobile technologies. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW ’11), 475-484.

Hayes, G.R., Patterson, D.J., Singh, M., Gravem, D., Rich, J., and Cooper, D. Supporting the Transition from Hospital to Home for Premature Infants Using Integrated Mobile Computing and Sensor Support. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. In press.

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 (March 2010)

Congratulations to David Nguyen, STAR’s first PhD graduate as he has just accepted an offer from Nokia Research Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale, CA as a Senior Researcher.

Congratulations David!

Current Researchers: Lynn Dombrowski, Amy Voida, Melissa Mazmanian, and Gillian R. Hayes

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.

Our research investigates several lines of inquiry. First, our research examines the role of different community partners who enable access and use of online services. Second, our work concerns understanding how different orientations towards the online application and service impact the application’s adoption and integration into community organizations and their work practices. Third, our work explores how the online application is implicated in reconfigurations of social networks and relationships within the community.

Research on outreach workers can better position future iterations of e-Government solutions, as a rich understanding gives design insight into how e-Government solutions work “in the wild”, how e-Government solutions exist within social contexts and value systems, and how e-Government solutions might address currently existing technical and non-technical barriers.

Congratulations to Garnet Hertz for successfully debuting Outrun in Denmark!

Video of Debut:

More about Outrun:

http://conceptlab.com/outrun/

Bren latest Spotlight highlights Star’s new Ph.D. student, Sen Hirano. The article highlights Hirano’s recent NSF Fellowship award and Hirano’s research and graduate work.

The article can be found here:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/community/news/spotlight/spotlight_hirano.php

Congratulations Sen!

Congratulations to Lucas Kam for being awarded the UCI undergraduate award of “Outstanding Contribution to Research”.

Kam has done research with a variety of graduate students, including working Jed Brubaker and his social media and identity projects and Lynn Dombrowski and her backyard bounty project.

Again, congratulations to Lucas Kam!

Congrats to Boaz Grudin and team for winning $5000.00 in this year’s Butterworth Competition.

More information about the competition:

http://www.ics.uci.edu/community/events/butterworth/

Congratulations to David Resnick for showcasing Pulse in ACE 2011!

Pulse will be on display until June 11th, 2011.

About ACE 2011:

Electromotive is an interactive exhibition featuring the masters thesis projects of students in the Arts Computation Engineering program in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine. Please come celebrate with us and enjoy the complementary food and beverages. This will be the final ACE show as the program is closing after this year.

About Pulse:

Pulse is a multi-modal transduction system designed to bring the participant into a flow-state, improve the participant’s health through integrative medicine, foster a connection to subtle energies, and explore a new medium for interactive media arts. Solenoids (linear pulsing electromagnets) are placed around the participant’s body at acupressure points and act as automated acupressure fingers. The solenoid pulsing patterns are coupled to a generative music program with playback through headphones. Resnick conducts the experience as the Vibrationist–someone who plays vibrations. As Resnick moves his hands about the space around the participant’s body performing biofield energy work, a Microsoft Kinect tracks the movements and actuates the solenoid pulsing patterns and speed, as well as the generative music.

The participant is connected to an EKG machine that displays heartrate information. The heartrate is analyzed and then used as an entrainment mechanism for the solenoid pulsing and music. Resnick can also see in real-time how the experience is affecting the participant. A study to gauge the feasibility and effectiveness of multisensory therapeutic/artistic experiences has been conducted prior to the June 2nd opening and the results will be on display at the show.

Learn more at http://www.davidresnick.me/ace2011/

Technologies and tools for electronic tracking and recording personal data have become easier to use, less expensive, and more pervasive in recent years. These tracking and recording technologies (TRTs) often work implicitly, in the background, without explicit effort nor full understanding on the part of the users (or those being tracked and recorded). Little is understood about how individuals make decisions about adoption or rejection of such implicit TRTs. A significant challenge then is to understand the processes by which the general public perceives and responds to these technologies, balanced along with their concerns for information privacy. Using multiple methods – interviews, the day reconstruction method, and paratyping, in concurrence with the deployment of a validated survey instrument for the concern for information privacy (CFIP) – this dissertation shows that participants are simultaneously highly concerned about information privacy and not always concerned about the specific technologies they use everyday that can track and record their personal data. There are three primary contributions in this dissertation. One, I catalog in situ perceptions and attitudes towards the concern for information privacy and TRTs. Two, by showing that traditional models of information privacy, such as CFIP, can be helpful but not sufficient to analyze the perceptions and attitudes towards TRTs, I identify the issues associated with applying the CFIP model to analyze TRTs. And three, I provide recommendations for the expansion of the CFIP model for use on TRTs.

David is the first PhD student to graduate from our group. Congratulations David! We look forward to the hooding on June 4!

We would like to congratulate one of our newest STAR members, Robert Greg Rodriguez, and his team, for taking second place at the IEEE’s Student Ethics Competition! Well Done Robert!

Photos of the event.

IEEE’s Student Ethics Competition

UCI IEEE