Today was a hectic mix of meeting new people, continuing to try to get settled, setting up for the weeks ahead, and beginning to think about which project I might want to work on. I sat with Patrick and Aehong at lunch and became very interested in her project. I want to pursue research that helps people with disabilities, and have experience working with caregivers and as a respite provider for both children and older adults. Her presentation this afternoon convinced me that I could find working on that project meaningful, even if it is only in the beginning stages.

In Designing Health and Fitness Apps with Older Adults: Examining the Value of Experience-Based Co-Design (2018), Harrington et al. develop a method for assessing potential improvements to fitness-based (and general health-focused) apps for older adults through “co-design” sessions. Older adults were assigned one of three fitness mobile apps to use for 10 weeks and then these co-design sessions took place and included those adults who used the apps for the whole time period and those who gave up less than halfway in. The research team was able to use the information gathered from both categories of older adults in order to create a list of recommendations when designing health-based applications with older adults in mind. For example, since many older adults expressed interest in being able to count yardwork, errands, and other daily activities as physical activity, allowing users to define their own activities could add this flexibility into their activity tracking. Additionally, social features allowing older adults to connect with friends through their fitness app were highly appealing while social features more centered around meeting new people were not valued much at all by this group. Apart from the findings that resulted in their recommendations, Harrington et al. also emphasized the usefulness of a co-design approach, especially when dealing with older adults.

In How Information Sharing about Care Recipients by Family Caregivers Impacts Family Communication (2018), Yamashita et al. developed a tool that allowed family caregivers of adults with depression to anonymously share their journal entries and logged caregiving data with other caregivers and measured the impact this had on the relationships between caregivers and care recipients.  While the logging data did not appear to be all that useful to other caregivers, reading other journal entries seemed to have a significant impact. This capability changed the way caregivers wrote their blog posts — making them more careful and clear. They were able to learn from the experiences of others and use other caregivers’ posts as a way to start conversations with their care recipients about more sensitive topics. Many care recipients also appeared to express more interest in seeing what other caregivers were saying.  There were drawbacks to this approach — it could make some of the care recipients overly competitive and the system could be abused by less self-disciplined caregivers — but overall seemed to facilitate family communication.

I downloaded Mendeley and like the layout of it and how easily I can navigate between sources and add notes and highlights. I’m familiar with LaTeX already, but haven’t used Mendeley before, so I am looking forward to figuring out how to export a collection of sources from Mendeley to BibLaTeX, if that is possible.

My example of a citation tree can be found below: