Ramp Up Week – Wednesday | Wellness Innovation and Interaction Lab

Today, the third day of Ramp-Up Week, was a lot of fun because we got to pay around with Arduino and Tableau. We also learned about the proper ways to create a Press release. We also delved deeper into ShareLateX and Mendeley learned more about their functions.

Homework:

Press Release | Arduino | VIdeo:

One of our homework assignments is to develop a device using Arduino ot solve an existing problem and to create a press release and video to go a long with it. I worked with Gerald Pienda and Hanifa Hotelwala we created a device that solves procrastination. Click here to see the press release.

Tableau: We were asked to use Tableau to analyze the data collected by Haley since February of 2018. The data included her heart rate, step count, and total calories burned on each day between February 14th and May 21. I focused on the data collected in the month of may. Fig 1. below shows the total amount of steps Haley took on each of the days in May. Fig 2. below shows her heart rate on each of the days in May.

Figure 1.

Figure 2.

As you can see a high daily step count does not mean a higher heart rate; nor does a low step count equal a lower step-count. In fact, on the day that Haley had the lower step count, she had the highest heart rate. While Haley’s step-count varied greatly on a daily basis, her heart rate remained between 65 and 75. As you can see in Figure 1., the only noticeable trend was the increase in steps each Friday during May. One noticeable outlier is the over 18k steps on May 5th seen in Figure 1.

Summary Revised:

“Designing Health and Fitness Apps with Older Adults: Examining the Value of Experience-Based Co-Design” (2018) – Christina N. Harrington, Lauren Wilcox, Kay Connelly, Wendy Rogers & Jon Sanford.

The researchers of this paper understood that there was a disconnect between the elderly population and their interaction with mobile health apps. They also understood that involving these older adults in the design process can have positive effects on how these apps are used by this population. Therefore, they focused their research on finding the best way to engage the older population in the design process. Over the course of 10 weeks, 25 older adults between the age of 65 and 80 were included in a study that asked them to test out a fitness apps for 9 weeks then work with the researchers as co-design to improve the app. While 25 of them were included in the study, there were 13 users and 12 non users. They discovered that experience-based co-designing is a beneficial method because although it increases the risk of bias from the user/co-designers, it allows for a holistic approach to the design of the app that benefits the community in which the app is targeting. This approach allowed the co-designers to provide feedback on what about the app works and what the app is lacking.

Thanks again for checking out my blog!

Here is a picture of chopsticks from Chow Bar, the restaurant where my team for the Arduino assignment had dinner.

Can you use chopsticks?