Week 2 Reflection

Aehong, Gustavo, and I have hit the ground running this week. We completed our first interview on Wednesday morning and Aehong completed another one while Gustavo and I were at the REU workshop. During the first interview, Gustavo took notes and I asked clarifying and follow-up questions. On Friday, Gustavo will start transcribing the first interview and I will start transcribing the second one.

Our ultimate deliverables for this project will include a paper with our analysis of the interviews (we hope to get in at least 15 interviews — some with family caregivers and some with respite care providers). We hope to also have a prototype ready to present at the end of the program as well, based on what we learn are significant issues in the interviews. Aehong and Dr. Shih have talked about the possibility of submitting our work to CHI, specifically in the Student Design Competition. They also talked about the possibility of us staying on and continuing to contribute to the work remotely after the conclusion of the 10-week program, since the project won’t be beyond the design stage before then.

This week, I spent the bulk of my time collecting, sorting, and reading papers for the Related Works section of our paper. Aehong sent us 5 papers she considers the most relevant to our work, so I read those closely right away. She also sent us ~25 other papers to look over, and by skimming through those, we were able to collaboratively pick out major themes and categories to separate as subsections of related works. From there, she tasked us with finding an additional 10 related papers each, and picking one as the “most important” (i.e. most relevant to our own subject, methods, and structure). We will discuss all of our most important papers on Friday.

The paper I believe I will focus on for that task is referenced below. It describes a process by which researchers interviewed caregivers of preterm infants and medical professionals who work with preterm infants and then developed a mobile application (with additional input from medical professionals) to help parents track information about their child that is relevant to medical professionals without getting overwhelmed or bogged down by data collection. It strikes me as particularly relevant to our project since it follows our projected timeline from start to finish: interviews with two populations who need to communicate and transfer information to one another, design and development based on the information gleaned from those interviews, and then creation of an actual product.

Tang, K., Hirano, S., Cheng, K., & Hayes, G. (2012). Balancing Caregiver and Clinician Needs in a Mobile Health Informatics Tool for Preterm Infants. Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.4108/icst.pervasivehealth.2012.248716

I’ve done most of my searching through Google Scholar, taking advantage of the ability to find works that have referenced a particular work. There were a number of survey papers or older papers that created initial designs or principles for related issues, so I tried to use those as starting points to find works that have built off of them.

Week 3 and potentially Week 4, our team will likely still be recruiting people to interview.

Weeks 3-5, we will be carrying out those interviews and transcribing them throughout this process.

Week 6, we will hopefully be done transcribing and will have done some preliminary analysis individually that we will continue as a group.

Week 7, we will hopefully be able to finish up our group analysis and begin our design process

Weeks 8-10, we will continue iterating on our work and hopefully have a detailed prototype by the end of it.

Throughout, I will be working on the paper and trying to keep up with the ProHealth outlined timeline.