CHS: Small: Experiential Learning Systems for Promoting Wellness in Low-Income Families

CHS：小型：促进低收入家庭健康的体验式学习系统

• 批准号: 1618406
• 负责人: Andrea Parker
• 金额: $ 49.95万
• 依托单位: Northeastern University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2016-09-01 至 2020-10-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1618406&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CHS; Small; Experiential; Learning; Systems

This project will advance research around using health-monitoring tools, such as sensor-based physical activity trackers, to support healthy behaviors for children in low-income families. In comparison to the general population, low-income families face disproportionate barriers to wellness, such as persistent social stressors and limited environmental support for behavior change. As such, a key technical challenge is designing systems that help families learn how to overcome these barriers to physical activity. To identify design opportunities, the team will first study how lower-income families currently use and think about physical activity tracking devices and data. This knowledge will then be used to redesign an existing software application that motivates children to exercise by helping them learn from sensor-collected physical activity data. In this research, the team will work closely with families to target the application more directly at their needs, while adding features to support "experiential learning"--the idea that reflecting on concrete past experiences can help people develop insights that guide their future behavior. The researchers will then conduct long-term studies of the tool in use, evaluating its impact on exercise and health, while learning more about the design issues that arise when supporting family-based activity tracking and learning. The combination of the use of experiential learning approaches, the low-income and family contexts, and the long-term evaluation all promise to extend what is currently known about designing systems that motivate physical activity. This work will have a practical impact on the widespread public health problem of childhood obesity, both by directly helping the families involved in the project and indirectly helping others through releasing the experiential learning tools and new design insights. The work will also provide educational benefits. Apart from the health education aspects of the system itself, the team will develop learning opportunities where college students work closely with local communities both to improve their learning and help those communities. These opportunities will also give lower-income children a way to participate directly in computer science research, helping them see what it would be like to be computer scientists or researchers themselves. In the first stage of work, the project will develop a grounded theory of how well existing physical activity tracking tools do and could support data collection, management, and experiential learning in low-income families. This theory will be developed through a combination of interviews and a trial deployment of activity trackers to both children and their caregivers. This theory will guide the second stage, in which the team will conduct participatory design research with families. Through this work, the team will design, build, and evaluate system prototypes that emphasize elements of experiential learning, particularly abstract conceptualization (identifying meaningful insights from activity data that can be applied to future situations) and active experimentation (testing out these new insights). The second stage will have two main outcomes. The first outcome will be a high-fidelity prototype of a system that tracks and represents physical activity among family members in a way that engages their attention and helps them engage in collaborative learning and experimentation. The second outcome will be a framework for the design of experiential learning systems that builds on the theory from the first stage. The prototype will be the basis of the third stage, a six-month deployment of the system to a number of families. In this stage, the team will gradually deploy features of the full system, and use a combination of survey instruments, interviews, and logged activity and usage data to refine the design framework and to evaluate the system's effect on knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors around physical activity. In total, the work will lead to design recommendations that will help researchers and developers build persuasive systems that encourage active engagement with physical activity data. In addition, this work will produce protocols for evaluating systems that support experiential learning from health data, knowledge about the challenges of designing such systems for families rather than individuals, and the software system itself. Each of these outputs will be valuable to both researchers and designers in this domain. Furthermore, the participatory design workshops will engage lower-income children in the creative process of technology design, which can pique their interest in a computer science career, while also providing the context for an innovative service-learning curriculum for existing college students. Finally, the software system will help to educate families about simple biological principles about the importance of physical activity in a socially and socioeconomically relevant way.

该项目将使用健康监测工具（例如基于传感器的体育活动跟踪器）来推动研究的研究，以支持低收入家庭儿童的健康行为。 与普通人群相比，低收入家庭面临着对健康的不成比例障碍，例如持续的社会压力源和对行为改变的环境支持有限。因此，关键的技术挑战是设计系统，以帮助家庭学习如何克服这些体育锻炼的障碍。为了确定设计机会，团队将首先研究低收入家庭当前如何使用和思考跟踪设备和数据的体育锻炼。然后，这些知识将用于重新设计现有的软件应用程序，该应用程序通过帮助他们从传感器收集的体育活动数据中学习来激励儿童进行锻炼。 在这项研究中，团队将与家庭紧密合作，以更直接地针对应用程序的需求，同时添加功能以支持“体验式学习” - 反思过去的过去经验的想法可以帮助人们开发指导他们未来行为的见解。 然后，研究人员将对使用的工具进行长期研究，评估其对运动和健康的影响，同时更多地了解支持基于家庭的活动跟踪和学习时出现的设计问题。 使用体验式学习方法，低收入和家庭环境以及长期评估的结合，都希望扩展有关激励体育锻炼的设计系统所知的内容。 这项工作将通过直接帮助参与该项目的家庭以及间接帮助他人，通过发布体验式学习工具和新的设计见解，从而对童年肥胖的广泛公共卫生问题产生实际影响。 这项工作还将提供教育利益。 除了系统本身的健康教育方面外，团队还将开发学习机会，而大学生与当地社区紧密合作，以改善他们的学习并帮助这些社区。 这些机会还将为低收入儿童提供直接参与计算机科学研究的方式，从而帮助他们看到自己是计算机科学家或研究人员本身的感觉。在工作的第一阶段，该项目将发展一个基本的理论，说明现有的体育活动跟踪工具的表现如何，并且可以支持低收入家庭中的数据收集，管理和体验学习。该理论将通过访谈和对儿童及其护理人员的活动跟踪器进行试验的结合来发展。 该理论将指导第二阶段，在该阶段中，团队将向家庭进行参与性设计研究。通过这项工作，团队将设计，构建和评估系统的原型，这些原型强调了体验式学习的要素，尤其是抽象的概念化（从活动数据中识别有意义的见解，可以应用于未来情况）和主动实验（测试这些新见解）。 第二阶段将有两个主要结果。第一个结果将是系统的高保真原型，该系统以吸引注意力并帮助他们进行协作学习和实验的方式跟踪和代表家庭成员之间的体育活动。第二个结果将是设计经验式学习系统的框架，该系统从第一阶段开始基于理论。 该原型将是第三阶段的基础，该系统将系统部署给许多家庭。 在此阶段，团队将逐渐部署完整系统的功能，并结合调查工具，访谈和记录的活动和用法数据来完善设计框架，并评估系统对知识，态度和围绕体育活动行为的影响。总的来说，这项工作将导致设计建议，以帮助研究人员和开发人员建立有说服力的系统，以鼓励积极参与体育活动数据。此外，这项工作将生成用于评估系统的协议，这些系统可以从健康数据中支持体验式学习，有关为家庭而非个人设计此类系统的挑战以及软件系统本身的挑战。这些输出中的每一个对于该领域的研究人员和设计师都有价值。 此外，参与性设计研讨会将吸引低收入儿童参与技术设计的创作过程，这可以使他们对计算机科学生涯的兴趣引起人们的兴趣，同时还为现有大学生提供了创新的服务学习课程的背景。 最后，软件系统将有助于教育家庭以社会和社会经济相关的方式进行体育活动的重要性的简单生物学原则。