Day 3: Mid-Way Through Ramp-Up Week!

What an exciting day! After a brief introduction the to the LilyPad Arduino yesterday, today we had a chance to create and modify some basic programs.

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After discussing videos that we will eventually make to promote our research and viewing examples of both effective and ineffective press releases, we were challenged to create our own press release for an object that we were able to create using the LilyPad Arduino.  Since I was unable to return to campus to collaborate with my classmates on a video to accompany the press release, you will see that my video is very brief and elementary, but I do hope that it may amuse you. Enjoy!

Press Release:

Mom, He’s Touching Me!

In an attempt to solve the age-old problem of siblings fighting in the back seat of the car, researchers at Indiana University are in the process of developing a Sibling Proximity Alarm (SPA).  The alarm sounds if siblings get close enough to each other to block light from entering the light sensor.  If the light sensor is blocked, an alarm sounds and parents can intervene to separate the children before a back seat war erupts.

“While this technology was initially developed as a tool to keep my children in their own personal space in the back seat of the car, there are many other practical applications” states Susan Monsey, the lead researcher in this project.  “This technology could be used to alert parents if babies or toddlers get too close to the stove, or even if kids get too close to the cookie jar!”

For more information about this research, contact the School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at (812) 855-6486.

 

Tableau:

Getting our feet wet in Tableau, we were given data collected from Haley’s fitness tracker and created two bar graphs.  The first one showed the sum of Haley’s steps by day of the week in the month of May. The second one (linked below) shows Haley’s  average heart rate for every day in the month of May.

https://iu.box.com/s/12vzxw1kuj0xwplksj6rar4brldrnw55

For these bar graphs, we can surmise that Haley is the most physically active on Saturdays, reflecting both the highest number of steps and consistently high heart rates.

Article Review:

Clawson, J., Pater, J. A., Miller, A. D., Mynatt, E. D., and Mamykina, L.
No longer wearing: Investigating the abandonment of per-
sonal health-tracking technologies on craigslist. In
Proceedings of the 2015
ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Comput-
ing
(New York, NY, USA, 2015), UbiComp ’15, ACM, pp. 647–658.
This was an interesting article looking at personal health trackers.  Fitness trackers can be a helpful tool to help people to manage their fitness and remain mindful of health goals, but only if they are used. Clawson et al. reviewed the listings of fitness trackers on Craigslist. “We identify health motivations and rationales for abandonment and present a set of design im-plications. We call for improved theories that help translate between existing theories designed to explain psychological effects of health behavior change and the technologies that help people make those changes.”