Please join the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) in Autumn Quarter for a 10-week seminar on current topics in the field by HCDE faculty. Each 40-minute talk will be followed by a Q&A session. Members of the UW community and the public are welcome. More information about the series is available online at hcde.uw.edu/521.
Title: Baby Steps: Designing a Child Developmental Progress Tracking System for Parents from Diverse Backgrounds
Date: September 26, 2012
Speaker: Julie Kientz, HCDE Assistant Professor
When: Wednesdays, 5:00-5:50 PM
Where: Mary Gates Hall, Room 241, UW Seattle campus
The CHiLL lab and the Baby Steps Directed Research Group have been 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 conducted a number of qualitative studies and design experiences to help develop 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. In particular, we are looking at how we can reach underserved and diverse populations across Washington State. We are currently in the process of developing a web portal with subsequent text messaging, Twitter, and Facebook links to help make tracking more interesting and motivating, which we will deploy with a large number of families from diverse backgrounds. In this talk, I will present our progress and findings on this project so far and plans for the future.
Instructor: Professor Jan Spyridakis
1 Credit (Credit/Non-credit)
Registration for UW students is available by entry code; contact the HCDE advisor by emailing hcde@uw.edu.
About the Speaker
Julie A. Kientz (pronounced like “Keentz”) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in The Information School and Computer Science & Engineering. She is also director of the Computing for Healthy Living and Learning Lab and is active in the Design, Use, Build (dub) alliance. Dr. Kientz’s primary research areas are in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, and Health Informatics. She focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating novel, future computing applications involving the capture and review of data for the domains of health and education. In particular, she has worked on designing and evaluating mobile and sensor applications for helping individuals with sleep disorders, assisting parents of young children in tracking developmental progress, and assisting special education teachers working with children with autism. Her primary methods of research involve design, engineering, and a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods. Dr. Kientz received her PhD in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2008, under the advisement of Gregory Abowd, and her BS in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Toledo in 2002.