Revolutionizing Accessible Device Creation

overview
To revolutionize the creation of assistive technology, our work is divided into three complementary activities

One in 5 Americans has a disability, and the needs of people with disabilities are extremely heterogeneous. Yet accessibility is not a given, and assistive technology today is mostly homogenous and very expensive. Our group is focused on the scientific challenges that can address accessibility across a broad range of domains.

Example messages about COVI-19 safety including "after we meet up, can you walk me to the bus stop? I've had some bad experiences, and as an asian-american woman I don't feel safe" and "I know everyone's vaccinated, but can we still be careful? A few things I had in mind..." and "These guidelines would help me feel safe: everyone is vaccinated; no physical contact; masks on; no sharing food/drink"

COVID-19 Risk Negotation

During the COVID-19 pandemic, risk negotiation became an important precursor to in-person contact. For young adults, social planning generally occurs through computer-mediated communication. Given the importance of social connectedness for mental health and academic engagement, we sought to understand how young adults plan in-person meetups over computer-mediated communication in the context of the pandemic. We … Continue reading COVID-19 Risk Negotation

A picture of a physical therapist helping a patient to use a stretch band

Physical Therapy Accessibility for People with Disabilities and/or Chronic Conditions

Many individuals with disabilities and/or chronic conditions experience symptoms that may require intermittent or on-going medical care. However, healthcare is often overlooked as an area where accessibility needs to be addressed to improve physical and digital interactions between patients and healthcare providers. We discuss the challenges faced by individuals with disabilities and chronic conditions in … Continue reading Physical Therapy Accessibility for People with Disabilities and/or Chronic Conditions

GLOBEM logo, blue text with a world for the O.

Cross-Dataset Generalization for Human Behavior Modeling

Overview; Data; Code There is a growing body of research revealing that longitudinal passive sensing data from smartphones and wearable devices can capture daily behavior signals for human behavior modeling, such as depression detection. Most prior studies build and evaluate machine learning models using data collected from a single population. However, to ensure that a … Continue reading Cross-Dataset Generalization for Human Behavior Modeling

A picture of two people wearing 3D printed PPE. On the left is a face shield (42.2% of submissions) and on the right a facemask (28.4% of submissions).

Rapid Convergence: The Outcomes of Making PPE during a Healthcare Crisis

Kelly Avery Mack, Megan Hofmann, Udaya Lakshmi, Jerry Cao, Nayha Auradkar, Rosa I. Arriaga, Scott E. Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff. Rapid Convergence: The Outcomes of Making PPE During a Healthcare Crisis. [Link to the paper] The U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) 3D Print Exchange is a public, open-source repository for 3D printable medical device designs with contributions from clinicians, expert-amateur makers, and … Continue reading Rapid Convergence: The Outcomes of Making PPE during a Healthcare Crisis

A diagram showing how we build stress & resilience frameworks for student mental health. The framework has three components -- social characteristics, cumulative stress, and resilience resources. At the center where all three overlap is perceived stress, anxiety and depression.

Distress and resilience among marginalized undergraduates

Nurius, P. S., Sefidgar, Y. S., Kuehn, K. S, Jake, X, Zhang, H., Browning, A., Riskin, E., Dey, A. K., & Mankoff, J.  Distress among undergraduates: Marginality, stressors and resilience supports. Journal of American College Health, 1-9. Stress and related mental health struggles are of growing concern at colleges and universities across the country and … Continue reading Distress and resilience among marginalized undergraduates

A barplot showing intervention acceptance for typout (57.2%) and typing only (48.8%) among 54 users over 10 weeks.

TypeOut: Just-in-Time Self-Affirmation for Reducing Phone Use

Smartphone overuse is related to a variety of issues such as lack of sleep and anxiety. We explore the application of Self-Affirmation Theory on smartphone overuse intervention in a just-in-time manner. We present TypeOut, a just-in-time intervention technique that integrates two components: an in-situ typing-based unlock process to improve user engagement, and self-affirmation-based typing content … Continue reading TypeOut: Just-in-Time Self-Affirmation for Reducing Phone Use

Practices and Needs of Mobile Sensing Researchers

Passive mobile sensing for the purpose of human state modeling is a fast-growing area. It has been applied to solve a wide range of behavior-related problems, including physical and mental health monitoring, affective computing, activity recognition, routine modeling, etc. However, in spite of the emerging literature that has investigated a wide range of application scenarios, … Continue reading Practices and Needs of Mobile Sensing Researchers

A lineplot showing anxiousness (Y axis, varying from 0 to 4) over time (X axis). Each student in the study is plotted as a different line over each day of the quarter. The plot overall looks very messy, but two things are clear; Every student has a very different trajectory from every other, with all of them going up and down multiple times. And the average, overall, shown is a fit line, is fairly low and slightly increasing (from about .75 to just under 1).

College during COVID

Mental health of UW students during Spring 2020 varied tremendously: the challenges of online learning during the pandemic were entwined with social isolation, family demands and socioeconomic pressures. In this context, individual differences in coping mechanisms had a big impact. The findings of this paper underline the need for interventions oriented towards problem-focused coping and … Continue reading College during COVID

Sampler of PPE found on the NIH repository

Medical Making During COVID

The onset of COVID-19 led many makers to dive deeply into the potential applications of their work to help with the pandemic. Our group’s efforts on this front, all of which were collaborations with a variety of people from multiple universities, led me to this reflective talk about the additional work that is needed for … Continue reading Medical Making During COVID

(Left) Users can select accessibility qualities to filter the places shown on the map. (Right) Clicking on a place opens a popup window to see all of that place's coded accessibility qualities, pictures, reviews, and additional textual descriptions.

Navigating Illness, Finding Place

Sylvia Janicki, Matt Ziegler, Jennifer Mankoff:Navigating Illness, Finding Place: Enhancing the Experience of Place for People Living with Chronic Illness. COMPASS 2021: 173-187 When chronic illness, such as Lyme disease, is viewed through a disability lens, equitable access to public spaces becomes an important area for consideration. Yet chronic illness is often viewed solely through an individualistic, medical model lens. … Continue reading Navigating Illness, Finding Place

Shows barchart of import of different features onetecting change in depression

Detecting Depression △

A series of research projects based on the UWEXP study have focused on detecting depression in various ways. Three such papers are listed below. Xuhai Xu, Prerna Chikersal, Janine M. Dutcher, Yasaman S. Sefidgar, Woosuk Seo, Michael J. Tumminia, Daniella K. Villalba, Sheldon Cohen, Kasey G. Creswell, J. David Creswell, Afsaneh Doryab, Paula S. Nurius, Eve A. Riskin, Anind K. Dey, Jennifer Mankoff:Leveraging Collaborative-Filtering for Personalized Behavior Modeling: A … Continue reading Detecting Depression △

Gender in Online Doctor Reviews

Dunivin Z, Zadunayski L, Baskota U, Siek K, Mankoff J. Gender, Soft Skills, and Patient Experience in Online Physician Reviews: A Large-Scale Text Analysis. Journal of Medical Internet Research. 2020;22(7):e14455. This study examines 154,305 Google reviews from across the United States for all medical specialties. Many patients use online physician reviews but we need to … Continue reading Gender in Online Doctor Reviews

Detecting Loneliness

Feelings of loneliness are associated with poor physical and mental health. Detection of loneliness through passive sensing on personal devices can lead to the development of interventions aimed at decreasing rates of loneliness. Doryab, Afsaneh, et al. “Identifying Behavioral Phenotypes of Loneliness and Social Isolation with Passive Sensing: Statistical Analysis, Data Mining and Machine Learning … Continue reading Detecting Loneliness

Passively-sensing Discrimination

See the UW News article featuring this study! A deeper understanding of how discrimination impacts psychological health and well-being of students would allow us to better protect individuals at risk and support those who encounter discrimination. While the link between discrimination and diminished psychological and physical well-being is well established, existing research largely focuses on … Continue reading Passively-sensing Discrimination

Lyme Disease’s Heterogeneous Impact

An ongoing, and very personal thread of research that our group engages in (due to my own journey with Lyme Disease, which I occasionally blog about here) is research into the impacts of Lyme Disease and opportunities for helping to support patients with Lyme Disease. From a patient perspective, Lyme disease is as tough to … Continue reading Lyme Disease’s Heterogeneous Impact

Picture of an elastic band with a sensor about the size of a belt buckle attached to it.

Hypertension recognition through overnight Heart Rate Variability sensing

Ni, H., Cho, S., Mankoff, J., & Yang, J. (2017). Automated recognition of hypertension through overnight continuous HRV monitoring. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 1-13. Hypertension is a common and chronic disease, caused by high blood pressure. Since hypertension often has no warning signs or symptoms, many cases remain undiagnosed. Untreated or sub-optimally controlled … Continue reading Hypertension recognition through overnight Heart Rate Variability sensing

Infant Oxygen Monitoring

Improving healthcare decision making with better workflow and information flow.

Severity of Chronic Lyme Disease

Johnson, L., Wilcox, S., Mankoff, J., & Stricker, R. B. (2014). Severity of chronic Lyme disease compared to other chronic conditions: a quality of life survey. PeerJ, 2, e322. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) health-related quality of life (HRQoL) indicators are widely used in the general population to determine the burden of … Continue reading Severity of Chronic Lyme Disease

A picture of the clavicle and neck of a person with translucent skin. The rib bones are visible through the skin.

Competing Online Viewpoints and Models of Chronic Illness

People with chronic health problems use online resources to understand and manage their condition, but many such resources can present competing and confusing viewpoints. We surveyed and interviewed with people experiencing prolonged symptoms after a Lyme disease diagnosis. We explore how competing viewpoints in online content affect participants’ understanding of their disease. Our results illustrate … Continue reading Competing Online Viewpoints and Models of Chronic Illness