Week 0 – Introduction and Bradford Woods

This week, considered Week 0 (I suppose computer scientists ought to start their iterations at 0 anyway), was my introduction to the Indiana University campus and the intricacies of the ProHealth REU program. I spent the initial two days of May 18th and May 19th in Bradford Woods bonding with the other participants of the internship. All constituents were from a diverse range of backgrounds and undergraduate educations, and I was pleased working with such a wide variety of students who had all developed a fervent passion for computer science. The sleeping arrangements were less than optimal, but I enjoyed completing team activities and bonding. All chaperones and staff were extremely helpful and facilitated communication and team building exercises. I was elated to have completed the low ropes challenge and irked with the blind maze ruse pulled on the entire team. I did learn a valuable lesson, being that one should never be hesitant to inquire about help.

After the Bradford Woods experience the team was assigned excellent apartment arrangements with numerous amenities. Monday, May 21 was spent completing “house-keeping” tasks such as obtaining ID cards and activating gym memberships. We then kicked off ramp up week learning our ten-week agenda and the fundamentals of research and expectations of the programs. I am looking forward to an exciting program and cannot wait to begin research and select a proposal.

 

The beautiful sample gates at Indiana University

 

Above is an excellent video portraying Luddy Hall, Indiana University’s Informatics, Computing, and Engineering building as well as all of its resources.

If you are curious about myself, feel free to visit my Linkedin:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-saganich-a825a6126/

 

Day 1 Homework 

Abstract and discussion summarization:

Today during ramp up week we held a discussion essentially debriefing us on the weeks to come and the research processes we should be implementing. One of the graduate students presented her project to the research team. It portrayed her extensive work with respite care and her attempts to develop technology to eliminate barriers for respite care workers and provide family care employees with emotional and psychological support. I found the project quite interesting and will most definitely inquire about the results upon the completion of the experiment. The team was also informed about citation trees and the importance of citing relevant research papers. Credibility was also a large component of research paper evaluation and citation. I found the first day of ramp up week meetings to be extremely useful and cannot wait to procure more skills in future meetings and workshops.

The first reading I engaged was the PDF detailing efficient and effective ways to read research papers. Skimming the article is an essential practice to determine whether or not the paper is relevant to one’s own research process. Isolation of the self and complete concentration is compulsory in order for information to be fully comprehended. Note taking is highly encouraged so that material can be understood and reabsorbed at any point in the future. Diagrams and headings should be glanced at first so that the one can easily determine what should be expected from the article and what one should anticipate learning. The article was eye-opening and will be instrumental for further abstract and research analysis.

The abstract that I read depicted the results of a longitudinal study done with HCI and mHealth application development using a Co-Design process. With apps that measure physical activity declining in usage, the researchers decided to involve the actual consumers and incorporate their design ideas into the interface to concurrently sustain application engagement and physical involvement. Variables such as age and gender were taken into consideration as well as prior experience with similar health-tracking applications.

Citation trees:

We were tasked with locating five forward and five backwards citations for one of Dr. Siek’s papers to demonstrate our understanding of the concept.

Forward:

1. Designing patient-centered personal health records (PHRs): health care professionals’ perspective on patient-generated data

2. Touch screens for the older user

3. Caring for caregivers: designing for integrality

4. Assessing older adults’ perceptions of sensor data and designing visual displays for ambient environments

5. MediFrame: A Tablet Application to Plan, Inform, Remind and Sustain Older Adults’ Medication Intake

 

Backward:

  1. R. Aarhus and S. A. Ballegaard. Negotiating boundaries: managing disease at home. In CHI ’10: Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 1223–1232, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM.Google Scholar
  2. P. Aspden, J. A. Wolcott, J. L. Bootman, and L. R. Cronenwett, eds. Preventing Medication Errors: Quality Chasm Series. Committee on Identifying and Preventing Medication Errors, Washington D.C., National Academies Press, 2006.Google Scholar
  3. S. A. Ballegaard, T. R. Hansen, and M. Kyng. Healthcare in everyday life: designing healthcare services for daily life. In Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, CHI ’08, pages 1807–1816, New York, NY, USA, 2008. ACM.Google Scholar
  4. P. F. Brennan, S. Downs, and G. Casper. Project HealthDesign: Rethinking the power and potential of personal health records. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 43(5):S3–S5, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  5. E. Coleman. Transition survival skills. http://www.caretransitions.org/transitionskills.asp 2009, 2009.

 

Citation Manager: Mendeley

I liked Mendeley because its interface was easy to use and it was recommended to me by a few of the graduate students.