Research Projects
Since undergrad, I’ve been honored to have collaborated with amazing researchers from Indiana University and the University of Washington, where we conduct research around Health, Family Informatics, and Child-Computer Interaction
Supporting Collaborative Care and Transitions for Families with Teens Living with Food Allergies
Proactive Health Lab, Indiana University School of Informatics, Computing and engineering
Collaborators: Dr. Christina Chung, Dr. Elizabeth Kaziunas
Childhood food allergies (FA) tend to be lifelong and require constant management with the help of adult caregivers to avoid reactions. Caring for food allergies is a collaborative process in the family, which can offer particularly useful insights into how the family navigates through different developmental stages of the child. Managing food allergies can be stressful for caregivers and involves a lot of time and effort in the family, from understanding the allergens, minimizing risks, and preventing severe reactions (anaphylaxis), to recognizing signs and symptoms of a reaction, and coming up with treatment plans. All of these can create significant physical, psychological, and financial burdens for not just the caregiver, but for the entire family. In this ongoing study, we examine the various types of challenges that families face in living with food allergies and unpacking the multifaceted source of stress and struggle for future design support. This project explores what current technologies and tools parents use to manage information and knowledge in caring for their teens’ FA, as well as the challenges and strategies for transferring the responsibility of care and prompting independence and self-efficacy for teens to self-manage their FA.
Examining Family Disagreements and Tensions in the Design of Family Meal Technologies
Proactive Health Lab, Indiana University School of Informatics, Computing and engineering
Collaborators: Dr. Christina Chung, Dr. Andrew Miller, Dr. Elizabeth Kaziunas
Meals are a central and messy part of family life. Previous design framings for mealtime technologies have focused on supporting dietary needs or social and celebratory interactions at the dinner table; however, family meals involve the coordination of many activities and complicated family dynamics. In this project, we examine findings from interviews and design sessions with 18 families from the Midwestern United States (including both partners/parents and children) to uncover important family differences and tensions that arise around domestic meal experiences. Drawing on feminist theory, we unpack the work of feeding a family as a form of care, drawing attention to the social and emotional complexity of family meals. Critically situating our data within current design narratives, we propose the sensitizing concepts of generative and systemic discontents as a productive way towards troubling the design space of family-food interaction to contend with the struggles that are a part of everyday family meal experiences.
Exploring Family Connectedness and Dynamics through Family Times: Understanding Family Mealtime Experiences
Proactive Health Lab, Indiana University School of Informatics, Computing and engineering
Collaborators: Dr. Christina Chung, Dr. Andrew Miller
Mealtimes not only fulfill our basic needs of survival but also serve important social functions in our lives. Family mealtimes have shown to support family happiness and communication, but can also be challenging to integrate nicely into our busy lives, especially when coordinating everyone’s schedule. In this ongoing formative study, we examined family mealtime as a multi-step collaborative process that consists of Planning, Purchasing, Preparing, Eating, and Cleaning(disposal). We designed a 2-week online study with families with preteens from 9-14 and worked with them through a series of family mealtime activities, interviews, and PD sessions. We aim to explore two research questions: What goals and challenges do families face during each stage of their mealtime journey? And how might home-based technology and design support enjoyable family mealtime experiences?
Precision Health Initiative - Wellness Technology for Pregnancy Journey
Proactive Health Lab, Indiana University School of Informatics, Computing and engineering
Collaborators: Dr. Katie Siek, Dr. Christina Chung and Dr. Kay Connelly
Prenatal and postpartum persons experience body and lifestyle changes that have direct impacts on their overall health. Activity trackers may aid in these changing times, however little is known regarding how commodity wearable may aid this transition. In this study, we recruited 38 participants into in-person and online groups and gave them a commodity wearable to wear for 5 months. Participants completed different activities such as survey, discussion, and media activities in their respected groups regarding wearable evaluations and general prenatal and postpartum experiences. We paired the participants’ experience using the wearable with the data produced by the wearable, including step count, heart rate, and sleep tracking. We also discussed the women’s current experience with the wearable and how future wearable may incorporate more pregnant and postpartum-friendly options to support the lifestyle and bodily changes.
Personification and Parenting with Amazon Alexa
User Empowerment Lab, University of Washington Information SchooL
Collaborators: Dr. Alexis Hiniker
This project studies interaction and parenting behaviors around Amazon Alexa, with a special focus on the personification of the smart home assistant and how it is used in families. We performed a literature review on social computing and mindfulness, and conducted data analysis on over 150 audio captures to understand and identify usage behaviors of parents and children. By doing so, we hope to understand families’ perceptions in interaction with Amazon Alexa and how home assistants can be utilized in supporting child development and family activities. Please check out our publications related to this project: Parenting with Alexa: Exploring the Introduction of Smart Speakers on Family Dynamics, Communication Breakdowns Between Families and Alexa, and Anchored Audio Sampling: A Seamless Method for Exploring Children's Thoughts During Deployment Studies.
SOARING Project - Supporting Health Information Management for Older Adults
Computing for Healthy Living & Learning (CHiLL) Lab, University of Washington Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE)
Collaborators: Dr. Julie Kientz and Dawn Sakaguchi-Tang
SOARING Project focus on Studying Older Adults & Researching Information Needs and Goals. Working in a multidisciplinary research team with expertise ranges from geriatrics and health services to medical informatics and consumer health, our goal is to better understand how older adults manage personal health information and the role caregivers play in these practices. My focus in the team is evaluating connected personas for health information practices of older adults and stakeholders. Through design sessions with designers, We gain insights to inform the design of supportive tools that meet the information management needs of older adults and supportive stakeholders.
Preventing Unintended and Malicious Audio Capture on Android Devices
User Empowerment Lab, University of Washington Information SchooL
Advisor: Dr. Alexis Hiniker
This project aims to develop design guidance for mobile operating systems developers seeking to protect users from malicious and unintended audio capture. We have conducted over 30 interviews and focus groups to study how Android users conceive of their smartphones’ audio capture behaviors. By studying people’s perceptions and then designing and evaluating a device-wide interface to alert users to audio capture, we hope to improve the industry’s ability to empower users to protect themselves. In the future, we will design a usable security layer for Android devices that brings users’ mental models of audio permissions into alignment with the system implementation and real-time audio capture activity.
Conversational Agent for Collecting Patient Information in Hospital Waiting Rooms
Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE), University of Washington
Advisor: Dr. Gary Hsieh and Rafał Kocielnik
Currently, patient’s information is often gathered with paper and pen surveys as they wait in waiting rooms. However, response rates are low. More data from patients are needed to understand low-income patients’ needs and offer tailored services to address these needs. This research explored the use of conversational agents to facilitate this data collection. In this project, we collaborated with Harbor - UCLA Medical Center on prototyping the user interaction, visual interface, and conversation dialogs. A working prototype of the conversational agent is created to understand if such an agent increases survey participation and improve the quality of responses. Future work includes understanding what tradeoffs between voice- and text-based interactions in this context.
Parental Involvement on Children’s School Performance
University of Washington Information SchooL
Advisor: Dr. Katie Davis and Benjamin Xie
This project aims to reveal patterns and trends existing with single parents, that have a significant impact on child well-being through adolescence. Through quantitative data analysis on the open-source Fragile Families Dataset released by Princeton University, we studied the correlation between parenting behaviors and their child’s school performance using data science methodologies. The Fragile Families Dataset is a 15-year longitudinal study following nearly 5,000 families. The goal of our analysis is to give parents information on how they can help their children improve academically. A final paper, poster, and GitHub Wiki are created for showcasing the findings.