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.

Evaluating the Usefulness and Usability of Collaborative Personal Health Record Systems

Leslie S. Liu & Gillian R. Hayes

Personal health record systems (PHR) have great potential to improve both health documentation and patient care. The introduction and adoption of these systems, however, have been relatively slow. In this work, through usability evaluations and clinician interviews, we evaluated the usability of, usefulness of, and the ability to communicate and share information through PHR. We describe the results of our evaluation, which demonstrate how a combination of usability, functionality, and socio-cultural influences are impeding PHR adoption and use.

PatientsLikeMe: Empowerment and Representation in a Patient-Centered Social Network

Jed R. Brubaker, Caitlin Lustig, & Gillian R. Hayes

We examine the patient networking site PatientsLikeMe relative to current trends in medicine toward patient-centered care and empowerment. We focus on both patient and institutional demands for personal medical data. Given PatientsLikeMe’s mixture of social networking and health management tools, we consider the role of online health communities in the changing patient/provider relationship, and the use of patient-provided medical data.

Researchers: Lilly Irani, Gillian Hayes, and Paul Dourish

Project: Online communities like second life can be a great place for people to develop relationships, and explore who they are and who they want to be, even when faced with labels, diagnoses, and other challenges in the offline world.  This project focuses on the ways identity, privacy, self-presentation, and interaction all interplay in online communities.

A recent paper from this work was presented at CSCW 2008:

Irani, L., Hayes, G.R., Dourish, P., Situated Practices of Looking: Visual Practice in an Online World. To appear in the Proceedings of CSCW 2008. San Diego, CA. November 2008.

Researchers: Patrick Shih, David Nguyen, Sen Hirano, David Redmiles, and Gillian Hayes

Project: Brainstorming is a collaborative activity. GroupMind is a large group display that will connect to participants’ laptops (local and remote) to foster brainstorming. Our current exploration uses mindmaps (also called concept maps) as the underlying mechanism for brainstorming. Development has involved retooling an open-source, single-user java application to be multi-user.  We conducted multiple in-lab experiments to understand GroupMind’s impacts on brainstorming activities and are continuing to explore how this and other technologies can support group collaborative creativity activities.

Situated Practices of Looking:  Visual Practice in an Online World
Lilly Irani, Gillian R. Hayes, and Paul Dourish

Abstract: Graphical virtual worlds are increasingly significant sites of collaborative interaction. Many argue that the simulation of the everyday environment makes them particularly effective for collaboration. Based on a study of visual practice in Second Life, we argue: first, that the practice of looking is more varied than it might at first seem; second, that we need to look beyond the virtual in understanding virtual worlds; and third, that implementations blend interactional practice. We suggest that the value of virtual worlds as sites of collaboration might lie more in their richness and openness to appropriation than in their simulation of everyday interaction.