Research
Much of my research focuses on technologies that support healthy living and learning. At the University of Washington, I am director of the Computing for Healthy Living and Learning (CHiLL) Lab.
Current Research
Baby Steps & KidCam
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We are interested in designing technology to help detect, record, and track important developmental milestones that occur in children during their first 5 years of life. By tracking these milestones, we can help parents and healthcare providers detect developmental delays such as autism or deafness earlier, which can improve the effects of interventions. We have developed design guidelines for developing technology to support new parents in record-keeping and implementing novel technologies to support better record-keeping and decision-making about developmental progress. We have also designed and evaluated two systems called Baby Steps and KidCam, which were aimed to meet the record-keeping needs of new parents.
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Abaris
Abaris is a fully functioning prototype capture and access application to support therapists who perform Discrete Trial Training therapy, a current best practice intervention for children with autism. We have evaluated Abaris in homes and schools to determine its effectiveness in supporting data-based decision-making through better collaboration, better access to reliable artifacts, and higher confidence in decision-making.
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Supporting Healthy Sleep Behaviors
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Many people have the desire to form better sleep habits, such as a more regular schedule, getting more or less sleep, or going to bed earlier. We are exploring how technology can help play a role in influencing sleep behaviors, aiding in the diagnosis of sleep disorders, and promoting good sleep hygiene.
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Empathic Interfaces
| More and more HCI research focuses on health care and the early identification of disorders. One danger of this is the potential for these technologies to cause fear and anxiety in its users over their health or the health of their loved ones. We are exploring ways that technology can be designed to be more empathic and sensitive to the prospect of delivering potentially health care information, and in particular, technology that may potentially identify bad news of a diagnosis. |  |
Acceptance of Healthy Technologies
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One of the aspects of healthy technologies in their ability to influence its users to change their unhealthy behaviors. There are many different approaches to persuasive technology, but it is difficult to find a one-size-fits-all approach that will work for every user. We are exploring the ways that personality type (e.g., optimism, pessimism) influences how users will accept and respond to different persuasive technology designs. |
Understanding Ideal Record-Keeping Practices
| The careful recording of health data has become important in maintaining a healthy lifestyle, identifying long term health trends, and aiding in diagnosis. Many new technologies are being developed to help automate this process to alleviate patient burden, but there are still benefits to manual recording from an awareness perspective. We are identifying ways to find the most effective balance between automatic and manual record-keeping. |  |
Past Research
FETCH
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FETCH is a mobile system for aiding the visually impaired in locating their misplaced objects in many locations. Through a focus group and individual interviews with the visually impaired, we discovered a need for a quick, temporary tagging system for frequently lost objects that can be used in many locations. We deployed this system with 4 users in visual impairments on a mobile phone using Bluetooth tags.
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Studying the Proximity of Phones to Users
Many Ubicomp and mobile applications being developed assume users alway have their phones nearby, but we suspect that this may not always be true. Thus, we are empirically studying the proximity of users to mobile devices to determine people's usage of mobile phones.
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Ambient Displays
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While participating in the University of California, Berkeley's SUPERB program, I worked with Anind Dey, Jennifer Mankoff, and Scott Lederer on the design and evaluation of two types of ambient displays. These displays were called the Bus Mobile and Daylight Display and were intended to provide information to individuals in a windowless computer lab. These displays were later used as test examples for a project on the heuristic evaluation of ambient displays.
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