IU-Bloomington Researchers: Kay H. Connelly
University of Colorado at Boulder Researchers: Katie A. Siek
Open University (UK): Yvonne Rogers
IUPUI Researchers: Josette Jones, Michael A. Kraus, Susan
Perkins, Laurie L. Trevino, and Janet L. Welch
Dialysis patients can only consume 1 liter of fluid and two grams of sodium each day. Currently, patients try to remember or write down in a food diary their fluid and sodium consumption. However, these techniques are insufficient because 80% of patients are unable to restrict their fluid intake. If patients miscalculate their fluid intake they run the risk of hypertension, pulmonary edema, and death.
Our research focuses on creating a personal digital assistant application to assist dialysis patients accurately monitor their fluid and sodium intake. Our Dietary Intake Monitoring Application (DIMA) will:
IU-Bloomington Researchers:Tammy Toscos, Anne Faber, and Kay
Connelly
Chick Clique is a mobile application designed to encourage teenage girls to exercise. Obesity is an increasing problem among adolescents. Chick Clique addresses this issue by heightening teenage girls' health awareness and inspiring them to set fitness goals.
The Chick Clique application facilitates a friendly competition between up to four friends. The application is designed to run on a mobile phone. Each girl wears a pedometer to keep track of how many steps she has taken and periodically enters her step count into the application. Her step counts are then automatically transmitted to her group. This enables the girls to compare their progress with that of their friends. The application also provides food tips to increase awareness of the balance between nutrition and exercise.
The name 'Chick Clique' was chosen by a group of teenagers interviewed during the design process.
IU-Bloomington Researchers: Kay H. Connelly
IUPUI Researchers: Janet Carpenter
Researchers studying episodes of chronic conditions (i.e. headache, pain outbreak and seizure) are typically limited to obtaining information from patient recall, patient diaries and data collected in short periods in laboratory settings. Patient recall and diaries are often incomplete and incorrect, while lab experiments have a difficult time in recording sporadic and non-predictable events, such as migraine headaches and seizures. In addition, lab experiments cannot examine the rich details of the many factors that lead up to a particular event of interest.
Further, many people spend enormous amounts of time and energy trying to identify triggers for their chronic condition. Again, the typical method for identifying triggers is to keep track of suspected causes in a diary. Success is limited by the accuracy and completeness of the diary, and nearly impossible if the condition is caused by a combination of factors.
Our research focuses on creating a toolkit that automatically gathers a variety of data as patients go about their normal daily activities. This data can be used in several ways:
As the number of mobile devices we carry grows, the job of managing those devices throughout the day becomes cumbersome. This is especially true for cell phones. Despite the many benefits they provide, cell phones create problems that arise from a mismatch between the user’s context and the cell phone’s behavior. In large part, the mismatch occurs because owners do not remember to frequently update their cell phone configuration according to the current context. It is desirable for mobile devices to automatically configure themselves based on the context of the environment and user preferences.
Our research aims to minimize cell phone interruptions in several ways:
The proliferation of cell phones has led to an ever increasing number of inappropriate interruptions. SmartContacts provides a solution to this problem by empowering the caller to make better, more informed decisions about the appropriateness of making a call by providing him/her information about the receiver¡¯s context. SmartContacts also demonstrates the usefulness and feasibility of a large scale service discovery mechanism for a ubiquitous computing environment. It supports automatic service discovery over the Internet in real time and on demand. It adopts a purely decentralized service organization structure, which provides better scalability and fault tolerance than most of the existing service discovery systems.
Access control for ubiquitous systems is an open problem. A number of features of smart space environments make the problem different from traditional distributed systems. Firstly, space dynamic environments where users, devices and applications can enter, leave and move around a security domain. Secondly, space has both a physical and a virtual context each of which plays an important role in access control decisions. Thirdly, collaboration within the space where many ubicomp applications require users to share permissions in a limited and ad-hoc fashion. Finally, space administrating with multiple sources of security policies make configuring ubicomp systems difficult.
The development of good security management tools are essential to make the system administrators' task manageable. We designed an administration toolkit based on the access control system for Active Spaces (an ubicomp project carried out in UIUC). In the access control model, a system administrator creates accounts for users and assigns them system roles based on their tasks within the organization. Each space has a space administrator who configures permissions to various devises and services within the space based on the system roles. Now we are working on visualization techniques to help administrators detect possible configuration problems.