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

Our paper on the design of a mobile tool based on the Social Compass Curriculum was accepted for publication at this year’s Ubicomp conference. The citation and abstract are below…. look for the camera ready version of the paper to show up on our publications page as soon as it is done.

Tentori, M. and Hayes, G.R. Designing for Interaction Immediacy
to Enhance Social Skills of Children with Autism To Appear Proc Ubicomp 2010. Copenhagen, Denmark. September 26-29, 2010.

Abstract:

Children with autism often require therapeutic interventions to support engagement in effective social interactions in different contexts. In this paper, we present the results of a study conducted in three public schools that use an educational and behavioral intervention for the instruction of social skills in changing situational contexts and ongoing social interactions. The results of this study led to the concept of interaction immediacy to help children maintain appropriate spatial boundaries, reply to conversation initiators, disengage appropriately at the end of an interaction, and identify potential communication partners. We describe design principles for Ubicomp technologies to support interaction immediacy and present an example design. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, we present an understanding of social skills in mobile and dynamic contexts. Second, we introduce the concept of interaction immediacy and show its effectiveness as a guiding principle for the design of Ubicomp applications.

Gonzalez-Fraga, J., Tentori, M. and Martinez, F. (2010) “Artifacts’ Roaming Beats Recognition for the Estimation of Care Activities in a Nursing Home”, To be presented at  PervasiveHealth (2010), Munchen, Germany, March 22-25

Congratulations to Monica Tentori and co-authors on the acceptance of their paper to IEEE Intelligent Systems.

Tentori, M., Rodrigez, M.D and Favela, J. “An agent-based middleware for the design of activity-aware applications” Accepted to publication in IEEE Intelligent Systems

Researchers: Sunyoung Park in collaboration with a great team at CMU

Parents always desire to take good care of their children and to manage their numerous responsibilities, including the family’s healthcare. Dual income parents often feel the pressure of tight schedules and busy routines. (In terms of tight schedule and busy routine, even though dual income parents feel in a hurry, their jobs doesn’t wait for them and make breakdown.) Without a proper system in the home, it can be difficult to track their children’s health information, leading parents to feel hopelessly out of control.

Interviews with several dual income parents and pediatricians revealed three main problems. First, there is communication disconnect between parents and healthcare providers. Second, mothers and fathers often have different opinions about children’s health management. Third, there is no proper and effective way to organize their children’s medical information. To address these issues, we are designing a healthcare system and service to reflect parents’ needs and improve automatic recording of children’s medical/health information.

Publications:
Park, S.Y., Jeong, H.Y., and Zimmerman, J. (2008). ENSURE: Support for parents in managing their children’s health. Design & Emotion Conference, Hong Kong, Oct 6-9 (Accepted for publication).

Jeong, H.Y., Park, S.Y., and Zimmerman, J. (2008). Opportunities to support parents in managing their children’s health. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing System (CHI), Work-in-Progress, Florence, Italy, April, 3225-3230.

An Empirical Investigation of Concerns of Everyday Tracking and Recording Technologies
David H. Nguyen, Alfred Kobsa, Gillian R. Hayes

Abstract: “This paper presents an exploration and analysis of attitudes towards everyday tracking and recording technologies (e.g., credit cards, store loyalty cards, store video cameras). Interview participants reported being highly concerned with information privacy. At the same time, however, they also reported being significantly less concerned regarding the use of everyday technologies that have the capabilities to collect, process, and disseminate personal information. We present results from this study that both identify and begin to explain this discrepancy.”

“Opportunities for Pervasive Computing in Chronic Cancer Care “ Accepted to the Pervasive 2008 conference in Sydney Australia.

Abstract: While changing from a predominantly terminal to an increasingly chronic condition, cancer is still a growing concern. Accompanying this change are new opportunities for technologies to support patients, their caregivers, and clinicians. In this paper, we present an in-depth study of cancer communities. From this exploration, we define and describe the concept of a personal cancer journey. We examine lessons and design opportunities across this journey for sensing and context-awareness and capture and access applications.