Hey y’all!
Today has got to be my favorite day so far of the week. I got a chance to program Arduino to do cool things such as blinking in intervals and have it play tones that mimic a soundtrack. In addition, we were assigned to make our own project and I had some fun with it along with Hanifa and Carla. We decided to make our project eliminate this generation’s kryptonite: cell phones. We had Arduino keep track of when a cell phone was on the unit by having the light sensor sense when the phone shadows over. Once the phone is off, the unit begins a ten second countdown and if the phone is not back on the unit, it begins to buzz and blink until the phone is returned to its original place. It helps people who often procrastinate because of their phone to be able to control their behavior.
Introducing the PhoneCrast!
Here is the link to our press release as well.
We also became officially introduced to Tableau. It helps organize data in an appealing way, giving all sorts of control on the data. It becomes super simple if you create separate excel sheets that store your data. We used already gathered data from Haley’s research, in which the subject was tracking their step count and heart rate. We were asked to create two separate charts that detail the average of heart rate and step count within a month, and compare the day by day results of each chart.
Strangely enough, the influx of step counts did not reciprocate with the heart rate. Certain day by days have a positive difference in steps while a negative difference in heart rate. I would expect for the average heart rate to be high in those days in which more steps were made; however, that is not always the case. Nonetheless, this hypothesis was correct when the step count exceeded 14,000 steps and the heart rate too (ex: 4/28, 5/5) was the highest within the chart. These results aligned with my assumption, however, the charts are often not as correlating as one would think.
Maestre, J.F., MacLeod, H., Connelly, C.L., Dunbar, J.C., Beck, J., Siek, K., Shih, P.C.: Defining through expansion: Conducting asynchronous remote communities (arc) research with stigmatized groups. In: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2018)
Modified Summary:
In “Defining Through Expansion: Conducting Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) Research with Stigmatized Groups”, the paper focuses on the effectiveness that the ARC research method can have on a stigmatized group. The study consisted of 19 participants (11 men, 7 women, 1 queer) and their range in age was from 18–60 and the number of years living with HIV ranged from 1–30 years. The study used the Facebook platform as the only form of communication amongst participants, allowing them to create their own relationships as well by supporting one another. The ARC method stands for Asynchronous Remote Communities and its main purpose is to create group studies with people from long distances. This allows researchers the ability to collect data without being constricted with a lack of participants. Unlike “Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) for Researching Distributed Populations”, the participants in this study were much more interactive with the study and seemed to be much more invested. Not only did the study prove that the ARC research method is effective when studying marginalized groups, but it also gave back to it participants by giving them another channel of support through the online social media platform (the participants continued using the private page to talk amongst one another). However, I am left wondering what is the purpose of this study and how does it benefit its participants, besides the $50 incentive.
Here is one of my favorite series of videos!
Happy Hump Day!
G