Wellness Innovation and Interaction Lab

Weekend
Over the long weekend I went to the farmers market, the grocery store, and the Bloomington outdoor pool on Saturday. On Sunday, I had the chance to review some of the related works for my research project and I went out to dinner at Mother Bears. On Monday, I finished up the related works and citation trees and went to visit my third cousin at his lake house. I have notes and citation trees here. The paper I found most interesting was Never too old: engaging retired people inventing the future with MaKey MaKey because it was the most similar to the project we are doing this summer. It was interesting that the older adults had fun with the toolkit and enjoyed the sessions but they enjoyed the socialness of it rather than the actual electronics. Additionally, they fit that the kit wasn’t really designed for them so that is definitely something I will have to consider when I am designing the tool kit this summer.

Tuesday
On Tuesday I started work by organizing some of my citations from the weekend. There are three general categories, creativity, older adults, and maker technology. While there is substantial background research on older adults and maker technology, creativity and health benefits from creative endeavors have not been studied thoroughly. I also read two papers, one on the LilyPad Arduino and one on common age myths in technology.

Then my project partner Mina and I met with Ben Jelen to discuss some of the literature we had read and what we should be working on for the week. This week we are working on outlines for our related works section and our methods section in ShareLaTeX. I will probably be spending a fair amount of time doing literature review. Additionally, we will be starting to assist with the participatory design workshops and build a toolkit. Hopefully sometime this week or next week we will learn how to laser cut and 3D print. During the meeting I was also introduced to littleBits, a maker toolkit (designed for children) with magnetic blocks.

After our meeting, I continued to with the literature review process. I read a paper on the interactions between older adults and social media regarding their creative endeavours, and a paper on empathy when conducting participatory design with people with dementia. I also read a paper on littleBits.

littleBits Exploration

Wednesday
On Wednesday I started the day with MORE literature review. I read a paper on developing technology to enhance the work of art therapists working with patients with dementia. I also read a paper that was a comprehensive review of the existing literature and it attempted to make a connection between resiliency in older adults and creativity. This paper was very interesting and using the citations from the paper, I found several more that I am interested in reading. The collection of papers has to do with the health benefits of creativity and how engaging in creative activities can prevent alzheimer’s disease and help maintain cognitive health. I also worked on the structure of our outline in ShareLaTeX.

Mina and I met with Ben this afternoon to discuss the papers we had been reading. We noticed some common themes in the papers such as creativity and maker technology and discussed possible ways to break up the sections further, like discussing maker technology in terms of children and adults. We also mapped out a possible timeline for the rest of the summer.

Then I went to a skills session where I learned about accurate note keeping to document progress, how reading scientific papers, and how to outline sections for our papers. After the skills session Mina and I coordinated what papers we had read so far and decided what type of papers we should read in the future. Additionally, we started outlining our methods section.

Timeline

Thursday
On Thursday, Mina and I met to discuss our progress on outlining the methods and related work section. We divided up the remaining reading and outlining the papers we had both read. I read through several papers which described the health benefits of engaging in creative activities and added them to our shareLaTeX document.  I also read some papers on maker technology designed for children and maker technology kits in general to fill out our sections (my notes here). To make sure we could cover all of the topics in enough depth it was essential to coordinate what we were reading. I thought that outlining the methods for designing the toolkit was the most difficult part as the criteria for including electronics will be determined based on the participatory design workshops.

Friday
On Friday, Mina and I met with Dr. Siek to discuss our progress for the week. Mina and I are probably going to read a couple more papers about Maker technology and start browsing online for items for the toolkit. We discussed potential papers that the project could produce and where they would end up. Then I went to the ProHealth Design Lab Meeting and heard what was happening with the projects. Eventually we ended up discussing the process of applying to PhD programs and the weight of GRE scores in the process.  It was helpful to hear about others’ experiences in schools and get a little advice about reaching out and networking. Research seems to be a vital part of applying to school after college and I’m glad I’m having this experience now! After the meeting I began looking for potential items for the toolkit. I searched on Sparkfun and Adafruit. I think I will probably pick more products from Adafruit because they are meant to be sewable and some are bluetooth compatible (without completely draining the battery).  Later Dr. Siek taught us how to 3D print and laser cut and I laser cut an awesome name tag. After work I headed to food truck friday with some other ProHealth’ers and then we walked to Baked.

Laser Cut Name Tag

Custom Cookies from Baked

Song of the Week