Graduate Research Assistantship

Monitoring Access to Health Information:
Exploring health-related decision making processes in people with chronic conditions

The field of home healthcare has become increasingly popular within the HCI community, and at Georgia Tech, there are many labs conducting research in this field.

For my Masters thesis, I worked in Beth Mynatt's Everyday Computing Lab (ECL) with Lena Mamykina, a PhD student in Georgia Tech's Human-Centered Computing program. Her research focuses on examining how people with chronic conditions manage their disease, and how technology can be used to empower these people by enabling them to 'explore' the relationships between their daily behaviors and their health.

MAHI logoMy project was targeted to help people with Diabetes. We're interested in exploring how these people utilize health information that is available to them, such as blood glucose levels. What are the behavioral processes that govern health-related decision making? How do people's mental model of a disease affect their decisions? When is health information utilized? How does this factor into their everyday lives?

In order to answer these questions, I developed a mobile application that will track a person's use of a blood glucose meter throughout their daily routines. I used the Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) progamming language on the Nokia development platform, including the Bluetooth and Multimedia APIs.

 

For more information on this project, check out the poster I presented at the Interactivity @ GT student symposium.