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School of Interactive Computing

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https://hdl.handle.net/1853/70783

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College of Computing

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https://finding-aids.library.gatech.edu/agents/corporate_entities/1113

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 11

Digital self-harm: Implications of eating disordered behaviors online

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-07-21) Pater, Jessica A.

It is estimated that 10%-20% of the US population will struggle with an eating disorder at some point in their lifetime [258]. Eating disorders is a complex set of psychiatric disorders that, regardless of classification, share several key characteristics including a disturbance of eating habits or weight-control behaviors and a clinically significant impairment of physical health or psychosocial functioning [3]. Self-image and identity are interwoven aspects of ED symptomology [86] and online spaces have been found to have impact on body image and eating pathology [217], thus highlighting the need for a deeper understanding of how ED patients use these online tools throughout their disease journey. A core tenant of social computing research focuses on understanding behaviors of people using online spaces [19,148,267] and how the design [21,190,253] and policies [40,191] of these spaces impact user behavior. This growing research domain is quite diverse. In the last decade, attention on how the social media landscape impacts mental health has drastically increased as the volume of users and the time spent within these online spaces has exponentially increased. The ubiquitous nature of mobile computing technologies and the rise of social media platforms integration into these technologies has given individuals unprecedented access to a diverse set of people and ideas. This ubiquity is so complete that 27% the most recent generation of users estimate being continuously connected to the internet [232]. Taking these factors into consideration, a need exists to understand how people with eating disorders use social technologies to support their disease states and what this online use looks like at a network level. In this dissertation I seek to connect a person’s digital activity to their physical health condition, an eating disorder. I ground my research in a quantitative and qualitive assessment of a specific population and condition: patients with eating disorders and the impacts of their online activities on their disease. I want to understand how social media use impacts a person’s active disease state. How are eating disorders characterized online? Should online activities that support active disease states be classified as a form of digital self-harm? What can be learned from assessing a diagnosed patient’s social media streams leading up to the beginning of their recovery journey? Over the last several years, I have analyzed eating disorder focused social media content across multiple platforms. Using this knowledge, I put forth an expanded concept of digital self-harm, grounding it within a clinical context. Finally, I worked with a set of clinicians and patients to understand the role that social media and other social technologies played in their active eating disordered activities and behaviors, thus testing my thoughts on digital self-harm with a patient population. In this dissertation, I test the following thesis: Patients with a clinically diagnosed eating disorder who actively use social technologies will use social media platforms as a process of engaging with digital self-harm activities. My research addresses the following research questions: 1. What is the presentation and characterizations of eating disordered activities online? 2. What are the online behaviors of people clinically diagnosed with an eating disorder? 3. How might evidence of online eating disordered behaviors best be integrated into clinical treatment? This work makes contributions to the Human-Centered Computing field through the identification and characterization of mental health issues across multiple online platforms. Additionally, it highlights the potential bias and ethical issues of these practices. To the health informatics field, this work highlights the direct connections of the use of social technologies and exacerbated disease states and the complexities of integrating this knowledge into clinical practice.
Supporting everyday self-management practices for pediatric patients with epilepsy

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018-06-05) Bidwell, Jonathan

Everyday life presents considerable challenges for people living with epilepsy. Many patients and caregivers struggle to adopt important epilepsy self-management behaviors due to the burden of data collection and reporting. New mobile health sensing and data input capabilities could provide opportunities for facilitating aspects of these patient and caregiver data collection needs, which in turn could better inform clinical decision making and patient self-reflection within the context of self-management. In this thesis, I present my findings from five research studies. I describe each set of findings in terms of both clinical applications for supporting patient care and technical implications for informing the design of pediatric mobile and wearable tools for supporting epilepsy self-management practices.
Personalized mobile tools to support the cancer trajectory

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2017-11-13) Jacobs, Maia L.

When managing cancer, people encounter many physical, emotional, social, and logistical challenges that impede on their quality of life and their ability to effectively manage their health. Helping people overcome these barriers is challenging, as the issues they face are not only broad, but also dynamic, changing over time. Timely access to health information can significantly improve a person’s illness management and quality of life, but often people feel under-informed or unable to find the necessary information. In my research, I developed new computing approaches for mobile health tools that consider the holistic and changing needs of individuals over time. To inform these systems, I have run a series of studies to understand how technology can better support patients throughout the cancer trajectory. These studies culminated in the design and evaluation of two novel mobile health systems: MyJourney Compass and MyPath. An evaluation of patients' use of these systems throughout treatment demonstrated the ability for personalized and adaptive health tools to encourage health behaviors and influence patients' health beliefs. This work makes contributions to the field of human-centered computing through the design and evaluation of novel patient-facing tools and the assessment of adaptive interfaces within personal health tools. To the health informatics field, this work provides an approach to offering multifaceted support for patients and an evaluation of how such support impacts patients' health management behaviors.
Social tools for everyday adolescent health

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014-05-15) Miller, Andrew D.

In order to support people's everyday health and wellness goals, health practitioners and organizations are embracing a more holistic approach to medicine---supporting patients both as individuals and members of their families and communities, and meeting people where they are: at home, work, and school. This 'everyday' approach to health has been enabled by new technologies, both dedicated-devices and services designed specifically for health sensing and feedback -- and multipurpose --such as smartphones and broadband-connected computers. Our physical relationship with computing has also become more intimate, and personal health devices can now track and report an unprecedented amount of information about our bodies, following their users around to an extent no doctor, coach or dietitian ever could. But we still have much to learn about how pervasive health devices can actually help promote the adoption of new health practices in daily life. Once they're `in the wild,' such devices interact with their users, but also the physical, social and political worlds in which those users live. These external factors---such as the walkablity of a person's neighborhood or the social acceptability of exercise and fitness activities---play a significant role in people's ability to change their health behaviors and sustain that change. Specifically, social theories of behavior change suggest that peer support may be critical in changing health attitudes and behaviors. These theories---Social Support Theory, Social Cognitive Theory and Social Comparison Theory among them---offer both larger frameworks for understanding the social influences of health behavior change and specific mechanisms by which that behavior change could be supported through interpersonal interaction. However, we are only beginning to understand the role that pervasive health technologies can play in supporting and mediating social interaction to motivate people's exploration and adoption of healthy behaviors. In this dissertation I seek to better understand how social computing technologies can help people help each other live healthier lives. I ground my research in a participant-led investigation of a specific population and condition: adolescents and obesity prevention. I want to understand how social behavior change theories from psychology and sociology apply to pervasive social health technology. Which mechanisms work and why? How does introducing a pervasive social health system into a community affect individuals' behaviors and attitudes towards their health? Finally, I want to contribute back to those theories, testing their effectiveness in novel technologically mediated situations. Adolescent obesity is a particularly salient domain in which to study these issues. In the last 30 years, adolescent obesity rates in the US alone have tripled, and although they have leveled off in recent years they remain elevated compared to historical norms. Habits formed during adolescence can have lifelong effects, and health promotion research shows that even the simple act of walking more each day has lasting benefits. Everyday health and fitness research in HCI has generally focused on social comparison and "gamified" competition. This is especially true in studies focused on adolescents and teens. However, both theory from social psychology and evidence from the health promotion community suggest that these direct egocentric models of behavior change may be limited in scope: they may only work for certain kinds of people, and their effects may be short-lived once the competitive framework is removed. I see an opportunity for a different approach: social tools for everyday adolescent health. These systems, embedded in existing school and community practices, can leverage scalable, non-competitive social interaction to catalyze positive perceptions of physical activity and social support for fitness, while remaining grounded in the local environment. Over the last several years I have completed a series of field engagements with middle school students in the Atlanta area. I have focused on students in a majority-minority low-income community in the Atlanta metropolitan area facing above-average adult obesity levels, and I have involved the students as informants throughout the design process. In this dissertation, I report findings based on a series of participatory design-based formative explorations; the iterative design of a pedometer-based pervasive health system to test these theories in practice; and the deployment of this system---StepStream---in three configurations: a prototype deployment, a `self-tracking' deployment, and a `social' deployment. In this dissertation, I test the following thesis: A school-based social fitness approach to everyday adolescent health can positively influence offline health behaviors in real-world settings. Furthermore, a noncompetitive social fitness system can perform comparably in attitude and behavior change to more competitive or direct-comparison systems, especially for those most in need of behavior change}. I make the following contributions: (1) The identification of tensions and priorities for the design of everyday health systems for adolescents; (2) A design overview of StepStream, a social tool for everyday adolescent health; (3) A description of StepStream's deployment from a socio-technical perspective, describing the intervention as a school-based pervasive computing system; (4) An empirical study of a noncompetitive awareness system for physical activity; (5) A comparison of this system in two configurations in two different middle schools; (6) An analysis of observational learning and collective efficacy in a pervasive health system.
Exploring online health seeking's potential via social search

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014-05-15) Bonner, Matthew N.

Online Health Seeking (OHS) is widespread and widely studied, but its ideal fit in healthcare is still unclear. OHS is seemingly emblematic of patient self-interest and control and is an intuitive fit with the tenets of patient-centered care (PCC). Researchers have made only a few attempts to evidence or leverage this connection, focusing instead on describing the figures and typical characteristics of OHS. Finding, consuming and sharing online health and wellness information is one of the common online activities, and consumers are generally satisfied with their results despite using simple and error-prone search strategies. Physicians are interested in their patients' OHS, but for a variety of constraints including time, compensation and traditional roles in medicine, most patient OHS goes unshared with doctors. Healthcare facilitators, a relatively new class of health professional that works to bridge the gap between their client's health and personal life, may be an ideal partner for patients in OHS. In this dissertation I share my investigation of the OHS-PCC connection, presenting a case study of a type of healthcare facilitator that has embraced OHS. By studying OHS, I was also able to contribute to the collaborative information seeking (CIS) community. CIS theory and social search tools have pointed to social factors that can influence the entire process of information seeking. In this dissertation I argue that nearly any social search design can be seen as situated or embedded in a unique socio-environmental context. I suggest that social search tools can be used as probes to understand the environment, and that interactions with a search tool can illustrate phenomena far beyond direct search motivations and goals. I also hypothesize that social search field studies can produce changes in their environment, producing changes in user relationships outside of the experimental search system. My study of OHS is an opportunity to test these hypotheses by creating a collaborative search tool that seeks to use OHS as a tool to improve patient-provider relationships. In this dissertation I present the results of a series of field studies at a local clinic that centers on a unique form of health facilitator. Drawing on several formative investigations and related work I synthesize design guidelines for a collaborative OHS tool and describe Snack, a collaborative search tool for OHS customized to my field site. I also present results from Snack's field study and an analysis of email messages between advisors and clients at the clinic. My results show that these health facilitators embraced OHS as a tool to guide and connect with their clients, but fell from this practice after a change at their clinic. After analyzing these results I discuss what makes health facilitators good OHS partners and cover implications for future OHS-based interventions. I also report the positive connections I found between OHS and other quality of care indicators like patient-centered care and the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control. Finally, I consider social search's utility as a probe and intervention in light of my results.
Information sharing in a nonprofit network

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012-08-08) Stoll, Jennifer

The civil rights and other social justice movements, such as the fight against child sex trafficking are examples of an informal context where information and communications technologies (ICTs) have been actively applied in hopes of furthering social justice causes. But while we see that informally organized, grassroots groups have shown considerable interest in ICTs, the actual effectiveness of ICTs for these groups remains largely unknown. This is particularly so when combining both the complexity of the technology landscape and large grassroots interorganizational networks. Given the enormous challenge of social justice issues, there are pressing needs that go beyond connecting more just individuals to help nonprofits. A central need of nonprofit social justice organizations is the connection and coordination of many different groups into interorganizational networks (or groups of groups). In my research, I conducted an in-depth qualitative study of such a network engaged in fighting child sex trafficking. In doing so, I have identified some of the challenges of information sharing and coordination in this context. I gained insight into their information sharing needs and practices for connecting within an interorganizational network. I also conducted a design exploration by building a technology intervention to understand how ICTs can better accommodate the interorganizational needs of information sharing for connecting. My research findings point towards an initial framework in understanding information sharing technologies for informal interorganizational networks.
Design and evaluation of a health-focused personal informatics application with support for generalized goal management

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012-04-04) Medynskiy, Yevgeniy

The practice of health self-management offers behavioral and problem-solving strategies that can effectively promote responsibility for one's own wellbeing, improve one's health outcomes, and decrease the cost of health services. Personal informatics applications support health self-management by allowing their users to easily track personal health information, and to review the changes and patterns in this information. Over the course of the past several years, I have pursued a research agenda centered on understanding how personal health informatics applications can further support the strategies of health self-management--specifically those relating to goal-management and behavior change. I began by developing a flexible personal informatics tool, called Salud!, that I could use to observe real-world goal management and behavior change strategies, as well as use to evaluate new interfaces designed to assist in goal management. Unlike existing personal informatics tools, Salud! allows users to self-define the information that they will track, which allows tracking of highly personal and meaningful data that may not be possible to track given other tools. It also enables users to share their account data with facilitators (e.g. fitness grainers, nutritionists, etc.) who can provide input and feedback. Salud! was built on top of an infrastructure consisting of a stack of modular services that make it easier for others to develop and/or evaluate a variety of personal informatics applications. Several research teams used this infrastructure to develop and deploy a variety of custom projects. Informal analysis of their efforts showed an unmet need for data storage and visualization services for home- and health-based sensor data. In order to design a goal management support tool for Salud!, I first, I conducted a meta-analysis of relevant research literature to cull a set of proven goal management strategies. The key outcome of this work was an operationalization of Action Plans--goal management strategies that are effective at supporting behavior change. I then deployed Salud! in two fitness-related contexts to observe and understand the breadth of health-related behavior change and goal management practices. Findings from these deployments showed that personal informatics tools are most helpful to individuals who are able to articulate short-term, actionable goals, and who are able to integrate self-tracking into their daily activities. The literature meta-analysis and the two Salud! deployments provided formative requirements for a goal management interaction that would both incorporate effective goal management strategies and support the breadth of real-world goals. I developed a model of the goal management process as the framework for such an interaction. This model enables goals to be represented, evaluated, and visualized, based on a wide range of user objectives and data collection strategies. Using this model, I was able to develop a set of interactions that allow users of Salud! to manage their personal goals within the application. The generalized goal management model shows the inherent difficulty in supporting open-ended, highly personalized goal management. To function generically, Salud! requires facilitator input to correctly process goals and meaningfully classify their attributes. However, for specific goals represented by specific data collection strategies, it is possible to fully- or semi-automate the goal management process. I ran a large-scale evaluation of Salud! with the goal management interaction to evaluate the effectiveness of a fully-automated goal management interaction. The evaluation consisted of a common health self-management intervention: a simple fitness program to increase participants' daily step count. The results of this evaluation suggest that the goal management interaction may improve the rate of goal realization among users who are initially less active and less confident in their ability to succeed. Additionally, this evaluation showed that, while it can significantly increase participants' step count, a fully automated fitness program is not as effective as traditional, instructor-led fitness programs. However, it is much easier to administer and much less resource intensive, showing that it can be utilized to rapidly evaluate concrete goal management strategies.
Understanding the social navigation user experience

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-07-06) Goecks, Jeremy

A social navigation system collects data from its users--its community--about what they are doing, their opinions, and their decisions, aggregates this data, and provides the aggregated data--community data--back to individuals so that they can use it to guide behavior and decisions. In this thesis, I document my investigation of the user experience for social navigation systems that employ activity data. I make three contributions in this thesis. First, I synthesize social navigation systems research with research in social influence, advice-taking, and informational cascades to construct hypotheses about the social navigation user experience. These hypotheses posit that community data from a social navigation system exerts informational influence on users, that users egocentrically discount community data, that herding in social navigation systems can be characterized as informational cascades, and that the size and unanimity of the community data correspond to the strength of the community data's influence. The second contribution of this thesis is an experiment that evaluates the hypotheses about the social navigation user experience; this experiment investigated how a social navigation system can support online charitable giving decisions. The experiment's results support the majority of the hypotheses about the social navigation user experience and provide mixed evidence for the other hypotheses. The implications that arise from the experiment's findings compromise the final contribution of this thesis. These implications concern improving the design of social navigation systems and developing a general framework for evaluating the social influence of social navigation systems.
Designing ubiquitous computing for reflection and learning in diabetes management

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-04-09) Mamykina, Lena

This dissertation proposes principles for the design of ubiquitous health monitoring applications that support reflection and learning in context of diabetes management. Due to the high individual differences between diabetes cases, each affected individual must find the optimal combination of lifestyle alterations and medication through reflective analysis of personal diseases history. This dissertation advocates using technology to enable individuals' proactive engagement in monitoring of their health. In particular, it proposes promoting individuals' engagement in reflection by exploiting breakdowns in individuals' routines or understanding; supporting continuity in thinking that leads to a systematic refinement of ideas; and supporting articulation of thoughts and understanding that helps to transform insights into knowledge. The empirical evidence for these principles was gathered thought the deployment studies of three ubiquitous computing applications that help individuals with diabetes in management of their diseases. These deployment studies demonstrated that technology for reflection helps individuals achieve their personal disease management goals, such as diet goals. In addition, they showed that using technology helps individuals embrace a proactive attitude towards their health indicated by their adoption of the internal locus of control.
Exploring a Technological Hermeneutic: Understanding the Interpretation of Computer-Mediated Messaging Systems

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-05-19) Voida, Amy

Empirical evidence suggests that individuals can hold different interpretations of a technology. In this research, I explore the question of where these different interpretations come from. What influences an individual s interpretation of a technology? And what is the nature of these interpretations? I explore these questions through studies of computer-mediated messaging systems, including instant messaging, photo-enhanced instant messaging, multimedia messaging (cameraphones), and mobile messaging (BlackBerries). In this research, I draw from philosophical hermeneutics, a domain of study examining the nature of interpretation, and present a technological hermeneutic, a descriptive theory of how individuals interpret technology how they come to understand the meaning of the technology in their own lives. This theory offers insight into the myriad resources individuals draw from when constructing an interpretation of technology, including their own experiences with related technologies as well as their interactions with others use and understanding of the technology. This theory also offers insight into the nature of the interpretive process. Interpretations are dynamic and evolving; individuals continually draw from new experiences, reengaging and reinterpreting technology. Interpretations are also hybrid and synthesized; individuals draw from multiple resources in an active process of interpretive bricolage.