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

该项目将围绕使用健康监测工具(如基于传感器的体力活动跟踪器)推进研究，以支持低收入家庭儿童的健康行为。与普通人群相比，低收入家庭面临着不成比例的健康障碍，例如持续的社会压力和对行为改变的有限环境支持。因此，一个关键的技术挑战是设计系统，帮助家庭学习如何克服这些体力活动障碍。为了确定设计机会，该团队将首先研究低收入家庭目前如何使用并考虑体力活动跟踪设备和数据。然后，这些知识将被用于重新设计现有的软件应用程序，该应用程序通过帮助儿童从传感器收集的体力活动数据中学习来激励他们锻炼。在这项研究中，该团队将与家庭密切合作，更直接地针对他们的需求来定位这款应用程序，同时增加支持“体验式学习”的功能。“体验式学习”是指，反思过去的具体经历可以帮助人们形成洞察力，指导他们未来的行为。然后，研究人员将对使用中的工具进行长期研究，评估其对运动和健康的影响，同时了解更多关于支持基于家庭的活动跟踪和学习时出现的设计问题。体验式学习方法的使用、低收入和家庭背景以及长期评估的结合，都有望扩大目前已知的关于设计激励体力活动的系统的知识。这项工作将对儿童肥胖这一普遍存在的公共健康问题产生实际影响，既可以直接帮助参与该项目的家庭，也可以通过发布体验式学习工具和新的设计见解间接帮助他人。这项工作还将提供教育方面的好处。除了该系统本身的健康教育方面，该团队还将开发大学生与当地社区密切合作的学习机会，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一种直接参与计算机科学研究的方式，帮助他们了解成为计算机科学家或研究人员本身是什么感觉。在第一阶段的工作中，该项目将开发一个扎根的理论，说明现有的体力活动跟踪工具做得有多好，并可以支持低收入家庭的数据收集、管理和体验式学习。这一理论将通过访谈和对儿童及其照顾者的活动追踪器的试验部署相结合的方式来发展。这一理论将指导第二阶段，在这一阶段，团队将与家庭进行参与式设计研究。通过这项工作，该团队将设计、构建和评估强调体验式学习元素的系统原型，特别是抽象概念化(从活动数据中识别可应用于未来情况的有意义的见解)和主动实验(测试这些新见解)。第二阶段将有两个主要结果。第一个成果将是一个高保真的系统原型，该系统可以跟踪和表示家庭成员之间的身体活动，以吸引他们的注意力，并帮助他们参与合作学习和实验。第二个成果将是建立在第一阶段理论基础上的体验式学习系统设计框架。原型将是第三阶段的基础，为期六个月的系统部署到一些家庭。在这一阶段，团队将逐步部署完整系统的功能，并使用调查工具、访谈以及记录的活动和使用数据的组合来完善设计框架，并评估系统对有关体育活动的知识、态度和行为的影响。总而言之，这项工作将产生设计建议，帮助研究人员和开发人员建立具有说服力的系统，鼓励积极参与体育活动数据。此外，这项工作将制定评估系统的协议，以支持从健康数据中进行体验式学习，了解为家庭而不是个人设计此类系统的挑战，以及软件系统本身。这些成果中的每一项都将对该领域的研究人员和设计师都有价值。此外，参与式设计研讨会将让低收入儿童参与技术设计的创造性过程，这可以激发他们对计算机科学职业的兴趣，同时也为现有大学生提供创新的服务学习课程。最后，该软件系统将帮助家庭了解简单的生物学原理，以社会和社会经济相关的方式了解体育活动的重要性。

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.