Research
Wanda Pratt's research is motivated by the problems
patients face in finding, using, and managing information. Her
research includes studying patients' work to understand their
problems, developing new types of technology to address those
problems, and evaluating the technology with patients. She leads the
iMed
research group.
See
Help
with our research projects. We are looking for the following people
to participate in our studies:
Current Projects
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Patients are playing an increasingly prominent and active role in
their health care today. Yet, few information tools exist to support
patients in this active role. In particular, patients often must
coordinate their health care across multiple clinicians, learn new
health terminology, make treatment choices, manage their home care,
track insurance benefits, etc. At the same time, patients are trying
to maintain their normal professional and personal lives, but the
intense information management demands information management work
of patients. In this project, we focus on understanding and developing
technology to help alleviate these personal health information
management problems in breast cancer. Specifically, we are (1)
studying and documenting breast cancer patients' personal health
information management work, (2) developing new technology that
helps these patients manage their personal health information, and
(3) evaluating the effectiveness of our new technology in helping
patients manage their personal health information and play an active
role in their health care.
Funded by the National Library
of Medicine
Our goal in this project is to leverage mobile technology and
Microsoft HealthVault to
help heart-disease patients lead heart-healthy lifestyles. We are
using mobile phones and wearable sensors to study contextual
factors that shape the behavior change process of heart-disease
patients. This information is stored in
HealthVault to enable data
trending, exploration, sharing, and use in combination with
patients' other
HealthVault
records. In this project, we focus on patients who have had a
cardiac event within the last five years and are now trying to
incorporate health-related behavior changes into their daily life.
As patients’ symptoms diminish and the demands of their daily lives
return to their previous levels, heart-disease patients require
additional support to avoid relapse and sustain heart-healthy
lifestyles. To address these problems, we are developing novel
mobile and web-based prototypes that encourage opportunistic
engagement in healthy activities throughout the day. Our prototypes
also enable patients to share their lifestyle information with
selected members of their social network to seek social support and
negotiate shared activities. Together, the support for
collaboratively negotiated social routines and small daily decisions
about healthy activities could enable creation of a sustainable,
heart-healthy lifestyle.
Funded by
Microsoft's Be Well Fund Award
We are developing casual, web-based and mobile-phone-based
games to help diabetics attain better blood sugar control. The games
focus on improving patients' ability to estimate carbohydrates and
calories in food portions. In addition to assessing the impact of
the games on dietary knowledge and food choices, our study will
assess how the use of these games affects patients' blood sugar
control.
Funded by the
Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation
Past Projects
The explosive growth in biomedical literature has made it difficult
for researchers to keep up with the advancements, even in their own
narrow specializations and to explore connections to their own work
from other parts of the literature. LitLinker is a text mining
system that incorporates knowledge based technologies, natural
language processing techniques and data mining algorithms to mine
the biomedical literature for new, potential causal links between
biomedical terms.
Funded by a
National Science
Foundation (NSF) Career Award
METIS
Based on studies of a public health research group and a
complimentary and alternative medicine research group, we developed
a new model that describes information synthesis behaviors and
incorporates new ways to use all the information in medical studies.
This model allows a researcher to incorporate typically unused
information from an article by augmenting it with facts from an
external database, such as those available from large
epidemiological studies. We also created a system called METIS that
semi-automates this process. One key component of this system
extracts relevant data from the tables and full text of medical
articles to compile that data into a statistical meta analysis, a
numeric synthesis of multiple studies. At the end of the synthesis
process, METIS generates quantitative and visual summaries that
capture redundancies and contradictions between articles.
We used this system to synthesize evidence on the effect of two risk
factors (smoking and alcohol consumption) on breast cancer.
Funded by the
California Breast
Cancer Research Program
DynaCat
DynaCat addresses the problem of information overload that most
people today experience regularly. In general, when people use
computer-based tools to find answers to questions, they are often
overwhelmed by a long list of search results. Many search tools
address this problem by helping users to make their searches more
specific. However, when dozens or hundreds of documents are relevant
to their question, users need tools that help them to explore and to
understand their search results, rather than ones that eliminate a
portion of those results. To address this problem, I developed
DynaCat, a tool that dynamically categorizes MEDLINE search results
into a hierarchical organization by using knowledge of important
kinds of queries and a model of the domain terminology for medicine.
Results from an evaluation of the tool with breast cancer patients
showed that DynaCat helps them find answers to those important types
of questions more quickly and easily than when they use a
relevance-ranking system or a clustering system.
Funded by the
National Cancer
Institute