SHB: Type I (EXP): Health Sense: Motivating Health Awareness in Children through Wearable Computing

在美国，儿童肥胖症的流行已经成为一个普遍的问题。这一趋势令人不安，因为超重儿童往往会成为超重或肥胖的成年人，并患有潜在的危及生命的慢性疾病。通过关注孩子？通过体育活动，我们可以将问题从治疗转向预防。有许多学术和商业应用旨在帮助个人监测并对他们的身体活动做出积极的决定；然而，它们并不能很好地融入到个人的日常生活中，因为它们可能需要手动活动输入、异步可视化和对应用程序的非本能意识来获得可操作的反馈。因此，虽然现有的设备在监测、推断和呈现活动方面取得了一些成功，但它们并不总是以直观的视觉抽象来传达身体活动的价值。反馈设计在为儿童设计可穿戴技术时很重要，因为儿童不太可能将可量化的测量与他们的健康联系起来。针对这些问题，我们设计了创新的可穿戴计算组件，使孩子们能够自己制作健康数据的直观抽象，以促进体育活动。该项目建立在现有的健康信息学社会技术研究的基础上，扩展了健康信息学这一新兴研究分领域，该领域研究如何利用技术使非专业人群保持健康并采取预防性健康行为。本课题的研究目标是：(1)设计即插即用的健康监测系统Health Sense；(2)设计图形化编程环境，控制健康感知系统的动作；(3)了解儿童如何使用Health Sense系统。研究方法受到参与式设计活动的启发，包括参与者观察、设计研讨会和原型的迭代评估。总的来说，所提出的系统通过创建新的、可穿戴的计算原型和交互范例提供了计算方面的创新。健康意识的广泛影响包括本科生和研究生研究助理的跨学科研究训练。研究小组正在通过“健康意识”讲习班，向社会经济地位较低的K-12学生介绍计算机、电子和健康。研究方法和结果被整合到pi建立的第一年一般工程项目课程中。此外，这些学院和他们的学生正在开发教学和推广材料，通过项目网站分发，帮助增加未来学者的渠道。pi和他们的学生通过在健康信息学和传统计算场所发表成果来传播他们的研究。最后，该系统还有助于实现2020年健康人群教育和社区项目的目标。

The obesity epidemic among children has become a widespread problem in the United States. This trend is disturbing because overweight children tend to become overweight or obese adults with potentially life threatening chronic conditions. By focusing on children?s physical activity, we can shift the problem from treatment to prevention. There are numerous academic and commercial applications that aim to help individuals monitor and make proactive decisions about their physical activity; however they do not integrate well into an individual's daily life because they may require manual activity input, asynchronous visualization, and non-instinctive awareness of the application for actionable feedback. Thus, while existing devices have had some success in monitoring, inferring, and presenting activity, they do not always convey the value of physical activity in an intuitive visual abstraction. The feedback design is important in designing wearable technology for children because children are less likely to connect quantifiable measurements - in this case with their health.In response to these issues, we design innovative wearable computing components that empower children to craft their own intuitive abstractions of wellness data for physical activity promotion. This project builds on existing socio-technical research in health informatics by extending the nascent research subarea, wellness informatics, that studies how technology can be utilized to empower lay populations to stay well and adopt preventative health behaviors. The research objectives of this project are to: (1) Design plug-and-play wellness monitoring Health Sense systems; (2) Design a graphical programming environment to control the actions of the Health Sense systems; and (3) Understand how children use Health Sense systems. The research methodology is inspired by participatory design activities including participant observations, design workshops, and iterative evaluation of prototypes. Overall, the proposed system provides innovations in computing by creating new, wearable computing prototypes and paradigms of interaction. The broader impacts of Health Sense include undergraduate and graduate research assistant interdisciplinary research training. The research team is introducing low socioeconomic status K-12 students to computing, electronics, and health through Health Sense workshops. Research methodology and results is being integrated into the PIs' established 1st year general engineering projects courses. In addition, the PIs and their students are helping increase the pipeline of future scholars by developing teaching and outreach materials that are being distributed through the project website. The PIs and their students are disseminating their research by publishing results in health informatics and traditional computing venues. Finally, the system also helps fulfill Healthy People 2020 Educational and Community-Based Programs goals.