CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS
Supporting Pediatric Patient-Clinician Collaboration In the management of chronic pediatric illnesses such as cancers, ideally, caregivers (parents) and clinicians (e.g., oncologists, pediatric specialists, and psychologists) communicate with the pediatric patient and share information in order to make medical decisions. However, in reality, children are rarely involved in consultations or decision-making about their healthcare, and even when a child expresses a desire for involvement, he/she is often not supported. In this study, we aim to understand current communication practices among pediatric patients, caregivers (parents), and clinicians, and to strengthen information sharing from the child–perspective in oncology care. Addressing children’s personality and emotional sensitivity offers an opportunity to engage and empower pediatric patients, inform the roles of clinicians and caregivers, and enhance the quality of patient-clinician collaboration, all of which can have significant impacts on health outcomes, as well as on child development. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Paper: CHI 2022, CHI 2021, CSCW 2021, CHI 2020, CSCW 2019 |
Improving College Students’ Mental Wellness Through Social Support The transition into college can be stressful and mentally burdensome for students. Accordingly, students face various challenges around mental health, including depression and anxiety, due to relationship issues with friends and family and stress over school performance. The significance of this project is to address the challenge of lowering the barrier for students to get help with their mental health. We take a preventive, indirect, and less intimidating approach by focusing on creative therapeutic activities as social support activities. The significance here is to increase students’ active improvement of their mental wellness by fostering their creativity. Through this research, we will identify design requirements for developing an online support group that allows for creative therapeutic activities and maintains mental wellness. Paper: The Arts in Psychotherapy (2021), JMIR 2020, DIS 2018 |
Designing an Augmented Reality (AR) System for Inclusive Play, Entertainment, and Physical Rehabilitation for People with Neuromotor Impairments We are conducting a user study with individuals living with neuromotor conditions on a simulated augmented reality playing field. Through this study, we aim to evaluate the design of the AR technology and user engagement and to identify design requirements to improve users’ physical skills and social and therapeutic engagement. The simulated playing field builds on the work of Solar Ping Pong, by associate professor Roland Graf. (http://assocreation.com/project/solar-pink-pong/). Funded by the UM Exercise and Sport Science Initiative (ESSI) Paper: DIS Late Breaking 2019 |
Investigating Patient Information Needs and Awareness during Emergency Care Visits Patient-centered care has become a key quality measurement in healthcare. New approaches encourage patients to participate actively in their own care by communicating and cooperating with care providers to make shared decisions about care plan. However, while many HCI and health informatics studies have focused on patient- centered care by incorporating patient information needs in chronic care management, very little attention has been given to emergency care. Through a qualitative study of patient visits in an Emergency Department (ED), this project examines patient information needs and patient-clinician communication during emergency care stays, when information is often scarce for patients. The goal of the study is to enrich current understandings of patient-centered care practices in hospital settings and inform extended designs of health IT systems to support patient information needs and awareness. Papers: CHI 2017, CSCW 2017, Pervasive Health 2016 |
The Impacts of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system in the Emergency Department
Recently, United States healthcare reform advocates have promoted the nationwide adoption of large-scale healthcare IT systems, such as EMRs, in the hopes of increasing the efficiency of healthcare processes and outcomes. However, the estimated success rate for the adoption of EMR systems is only about 28% with unintended consequences, such as increased documentation time, system induced medical errors, etc. This project examines the impact of deploying an EMR system in the Emergency Department at a large teaching hospital and ED clinicians' adaptation. We study the pre-deployment, transitional, and post-deployment stages of an EMR implementation by conducting ethnographical fieldwork with interviews with emergency personnel. We discover issues associated with workflows, workload, communication among clinicians, and workplace collaboration. We further develop guidelines to promote successful future EMR implementations. The study is focused on: - understanding the human-centered and organizational issues of the records transition process; - identifying and evaluating individual and organizational-level factors in adoption and adaptation of EMR. Papers: TOCHI 2014, CSCW 2013, CHI 2012, CSCW 2012, IJMI 2012, CHI (WIP) 2011 |
Designing Technologies for Managing Migraine This project investigates how people manage chronic migraine disease, characterized by unpredictable and intermittent breakouts, in their daily lives. The patients in our study have to serve as diagnostic agents to self-identify migraine symptoms, triggers, and effective coping mechanism, while also trying to obtain social recognition and help from a social network during a migraine attack. We conducted qualitative interview study aimed at understanding how people manage their migraine in daily lives and discovering opportunities for technology to support patients’ needs. Our study details the future technology designs that track a wide range of life events across intermittent time stamps and, support sense-making of subjective information, and help patients gain social recognition and assistances during the breakout periods. Papers: Journal of CSCW 2016, CSCW 2015 |
PAST PROJECTS
FitBaby: Study on Premature Infants 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 design an innovative and feasible mobile solution for infants and caregivers to collect observations of daily living (ODLs) and share these data with their providers. Fitbaby is an automated system capturing and accessing ODLs that allows parents of premature infants to capture relevant information of their newly born child. It also visualizes and summarizes these data for both the parents and clinicians caring for these children. Papers: CSCW 2011 |
Designing a Smart Activity Bag Dual-income families experience stress as they attempt to manage the conflicting responsibilities of work, school, home, and enrichment activities. This project explores opportunities for parents to explore technological support for managing their children's activities, helping them to feel more in control of their lives. Based on the field work with dual-income families, we developed the Smart Bag concept, which address two design opportunites: 1) a reminder system that helps people remember their schedules and what they need to take, and 2) a reminder system that allows parents to engage in parenting. Through the iterative design process, we build a prototype of the bag and we are planning to evaluate the bag in terms of measuring functional utilities and different social aspects on the bag. Papers: CHI 2010 |
Designing a Health Care System and Service for a Healthy Family
I worked on my Masters thesis research project for Smart Homes focusing on health management issues for parents who have young children. 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, which often leads to breakdowns, such as not being able to track their children's health information. Contextual 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. Papers: Design & Emotion 2008, CHI (WIP) 2010 |
A Study on Interactive Behaviors (sponsored by Adobe) Today's designers deal with various levles of interactivity and they wish to create innovative interactive behaviors. However, while there are a lot of ways to express "looks", for "behaviors" they have to deal with scripts and codes. Unfortunately, it is challenging for designers since the scripts and codes in most implementation tools do not support the natural expressions used by designers. In order to make authoring interactive behaviors easier for designers, the project explores opportunites to design a new language that reflects and supports designers' natural expressions by investigating how designers think about the components of behaviors. We conducted a lab study and survey focusing on graphical pointer-based interactive behaviors - part 1) pointer actions that the user does, part 2) visible responses to those actions on the screen, and part 3) constraints on the causality and timing. Papers: Two papers published at Visual Language and Human-Centric Computing Conference (VL/HCC) 2008 |
Intel Domestic Robot Intel Research's Personal Robotics project aims to develop useful robotic assistants for indoor, populated environments. To transition robots from structured, assembly line scenarios to more natural, unstructured environments requires advances in perception, reasoning under uncertainty, and human-robot interaction. I specifically worked on the domestic robot for senior citizen. My role was to develop scenarios to demonstrate what robot can do and design a touch-screen interface that allows elders to control a domestic robot that assists with aging in place. |
DESIGN PORTFOLIO
Below is a list of projects that I worked on as an Interaction Design Masters student at Carnegie Mellon University (2006-2008) as well as Industrial Design undergrad student (2004-2005) in the past. These projects employed a variety of methods and techniques drawn from HCI and design research to solve complex design problems.
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MotoTLR: Motorola Mobile Media Project
(Grad Studio 2 Class) ‘Mobile Media Life’ is a cooperative project with Motorola and is about designing a new system or service on mobile device for user group 18~25. Motorola asked us how to fuse community and multi-media in new ways for user target and how to deal with privacy and security issues. Our team launched a platform for personalization, named Moto Tailor (MotoTLR), which helps users personalize content and its delivery, create flexible user interfaces, and share these ideas and media habits with other users. It drives the media we know of now - information, news, entertainment, and communication - and plants the seed for the new media of our generation: a medium of ideas and expressions that revolve our natural acts personalization as we make technology work for, express and enrich our lives. [video] |
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Spring: Digital Music Player for Moms
(Introduction Visual Interface & Interaction Design Class) This project focused on designing a digital music player for a target group of our choice. The goals for this project were the following: - design product interactions that support the emotional connection between people and their music within the given context that make people feel better about the role they enact - extend the themes previously identified in the design of music players, including contextual integration, social interaction, and the connection between the product and the enacted social role Our design team decided to take on the challenge of developing a product for mothers as the main user. This task relied on researching the lives of mothers and getting to know the whole culture of how society would define mothers. The project was a process of reevaluating our outlook on mothers and challenging the false presuppositions that attempt to blind our design. With research backing our design, we brainstormed a broad range of solutions and began narrowing them down. Having settled on a final design, we implemented it, and presented its capabilities through a video sketch. [video] |
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Interactive Playground for Children
(Industrial Design Senior Graduate Exhibition 2004) Child’s play and leisure activities have evolved since my early childhood. Children in this era are virtually entertained which lacks physical and mental stimulation. Instead of utilizing a playground or incorporating outdoor activities, they tend to be attracted to electronic entertainment such as computers, video games and television. Though society has acknowledged this revolution, there is a little or no change in the structure or form of the playground. This discourages children from utilizing the playground and engaging in physical activities. Playground equipment should foster their need for adventure within a world of safety. ‘iPlayground’ is devised to inspire children to seek outdoor activities by matching the excitement and intrigue of virtual entertainment. It is orchestrated to safely provide interactive conceptual activities to enhance the physical and social skills of the children. 'iPlayground' has incorporating elements such as light, sound, movement, and sense (touch) to the playing area will provide effective physical growth while maximizing sense of joy. |
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