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Projects

Baby Steps

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. The Baby Steps project is funded by the National Science Foundation.
  • Kientz, J.A., R.I. Arriaga, and G.D. Abowd. "Baby Steps: Evaluation of a System to Support Record-Keeping for Parents of Young Children." In the Proceedings of CHI 2009. Boston, MA. 2009.
  • Kientz, J.A. and G.D. Abowd. "KidCam: Toward an Effective Technology for the Capture of Children's Moments of Interest." In the Proceedings of Pervasive 2009. Nara, Japan. 2009.
  • Kientz, J.A., R.I. Arriaga, M. Chetty, G.R. Hayes, J. Richardson, S.N. Patel, and G.D. Abowd. Grow and Know: Understanding Record-Keeping Needs for the Development of Young Children. In theProceedings of CHI 2007. San Jose, California. 2007.
  • Kientz, J.A. and G.D. Abowd. Designing Technology to Aid in the Early Detection of Developmental Delay in Children. UbiHealth 2006: The 4th International Workshop on Ubiquitous Computing for Pervasive Healthcare Applications and Ubicomp 2006.

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.
  • Kientz, J.A., G.R. Hayes, G.D. Abowd, and R.E. Grinter. From the War Room to the Living Room: Decision Support for Home-based Therapy Teams. In the proceedings of CSCW 2006. Banff, Alberta, Canada. 2006.
  • Kientz, J.A., G.R. Hayes, T.L. Westeyn, T. Starner, and G.D. Abowd. Pervasive Computing and Autism: Assisting Caregivers of Children with Special Needs. IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine. Special Issue on Pervasive Healthcare. January 2007.
  • Abowd, G.D., G.R. Hayes, J.A. Kientz, L. Mamykina, and E.D. Mynatt. Challenges and Opportunities for Collaboration Technologies for Chronic Care Management, Presented at The Human-Computer Interaction Consortium (HCIC 2006). Fraser, Colorado, USA, 2006.
  • Kientz, J.A., S. Boring, G.D. Abowd, and G.R. Hayes. Abaris: Evaluating Automated Capture Applied to Structured Autism Interventions. In the Proceedings of Ubicomp 2005: The 7th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. Tokyo, Japan, September 11-14, 2005.
  • Hayes, G. R., J.A. Kientz, K.N. Truong, D.R. White, G.D. Abowd, and T. Pering. Designing Capture Applications to Support the Education of Children with Autism. In the Proceedings of Ubicomp 2004: The 6th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. Nottingham, United Kingdom, September 7-10, 2004.

Supporting Healthy Sleep Behaviors

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. This work is in collaboration with Intel Labs Seattle and the UW Sleep Center.
  • Choe, E.K., J.A. Kientz, S. Halko, A. Fonville, D. Sakaguchi, N.F. Watson: Opportunities for computing to support healthy sleep behavior. CHI Extended Abstracts 2010: 3661-3666.
  • Kim, S., J.A. Kientz, S.N. Patel, and G.D. Abowd. Are You Sleeping?: Sharing Portrayed Sleeping Status within a Social Network. In the Proceedings of CSCW '08. 2008.

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.

 

  • Choe, E.K., M. Duarte, and J.A. Kientz. "Understanding and Designing Computing Technologies that Convey Concerning Health News" In the Proceedings of Design & Emotion 2010. Chicago, Illinois. 2010.
  • Fonville, A. E.K. Choe, S. Oldham, and J.A. Kientz. Exploring the Use of Technology in Healthcare Spaces and its Impact on Empathic Communication. To appear in the Proceedings of IHI 2010.

 

Personality & Persuasive Technology

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.
  • Halko, S. and J.A. Kientz. "Personality and Persuasive Technology: An Exploratory Study on Health-Promoting Mobile Applications" In the Proceedings of PERSUASIVE 2009. Copenhagen, Denmark. 2010. pp. 150-161.