Deepti Aggarwal

EdiPulse : Investigating a Playful Approach to Self-monitoring through 3D Printed Chocolate Treats

Self-monitoring offers benefits in facilitating awareness about physical exercise, but such data-centric activity may not always lead to an enjoyable experience. We introduce EdiPulse a novel system that creates activity treats to offer playful reflections on everyday physical activity through the appealing medium of chocolate. EdiPulse translates self-monitored data from physical activity into small 3D printed chocolate treats. These treats (< 20 grams of chocolate in total) embody four forms: Graph, Flower, Slogan and Emoji. We deployed our system across 7 households and studied its use with 13 participants for 2 weeks per household. The field study revealed positive aspects of our approach along with some open challenges, which we disseminate across five themes: Reflection, Positivity, Determination, Affection, and Co-experience. We conclude by highlighting key implications of our work for future playful food-based technology design in supporting the experience of being physically active

Doctor, Can You See My Squats?: Understanding Bodily Communication in Video Consultations for Physiotherapy

This paper investigates the challenges of bodily communication during video-based clinical consultations. While previous works describe the lack of eye contact and gestures over video, it is unclear how these limitations impact the course of a clinical consultation, particularly in a domain like physiotherapy where the focus is on improving body movements and functioning. To contribute to this understanding, we conducted observations of 10 naturally occurring video and face-to-face consultations for physiotherapy. We found that clinicians rely on a variety of incidental bodily cues and fine-details of body movements to assess and examine the patient. These bodily cues were noticeable during face-to-face consultations; however, a variety of bodily cues got missed over video. Consequently, video consultations became conversational where the clinicians used verbal conduct to get a fair understanding of the patients health. To guide design of future video consultation systems, we reflect on our understanding as 4 design sensitivities: Visual Acuity, Field-of-view, Clinical Asymmetries, and Time Sequence.

Alipi: a framework for re-narrating web pages

We propose Alipi, a distributed and participatory approach for re-narrating web pages for the purpose of rendering the content more accessible. This model supports alternative descriptions for a web page or parts of it via rewriting or re-narration for a given target audience by volunteers. The goal is to render the Web accessible to people across varied abilities, age, economic situation, language and geographic locations. We present the motivation, architecture and prototype implementation of Alipi.

SoPhy: A Wearable Technology for Lower Limb Assessment in Video Consultations of Physiotherapy

Physiotherapists are increasingly using video conferencing tools for their teleconsultations. Yet, the assessment of subtle differences in body movements remains a challenge. To support lower limb assessment in video consultations, we present SoPhy, a wearable technology consisting of a pair of socks with embedded sensors for patients to wear; and a web interface that displays information about range of weight distribution, foot movement, and foot orientation for physiotherapists in real-time. We conducted a laboratory study of 40 video consultations, in which postgraduate physiotherapy students assessed lower limb function. We compare assessment with and without SoPhy. Findings show that SoPhy increased the confidence in assessing squats exercise and fewer repetitions were required to assess patients when using SoPhy. We discuss the significance of SoPhy to address the challenges of assessing bodily information over video, and present considerations for its integration with clinical practices and tools.

Understanding Video based Parent Training Intervention for Children with Autism

This paper investigates the challenges of delivering parent training intervention for autism over video. We conducted a qualitative field study of an intervention, which is based on a well-established training program for parents of children with autism, called Hanen More Than Words. The study was conducted with a Hanen Certified speech pathologist who delivered video based training to two mothers, each with a son having autism. We conducted observations of 14 sessions of the intervention spanning 3 months along with 3 semi-structured interviews with each participant. We identified different activities that participants performed across different sessions and analysed them based upon their implications on technology. We found that all the participants welcomed video based training but they also faced several difficulties, particularly in establishing rapport with other participants, inviting equal participation, and in observing and providing feedback on parent-child interactions. Finally, we reflect on our findings and motivate further investigations by defining three design sensitivities of Adaptation, Group Participation, and Physical Setup.

Supporting Bodily Communication in Video-based Clinical Consultations

Over the last two decades, video consultations have emerged as an effective practice to offer diagnostic and therapeutic advice to the patients living in rural and remote areas. This thesis aims to understand how bodily expressions such as eye gaze and postures are communicated over video; and how can we design technologies that can communicate such essential information between clinicians and patients. As such, the thesis intends to augment the space of video consultations beyond video medium through the use of computational technologies.

Tastybeats: making mocktails with heartbeats

The heart not only represents love and emotions. Its measurement is also essential to evaluate fitness. However, visualizing heart rate so far has been limited to virtual screens with restrictive interaction, thus providing us an opportunity to develop a new interactive visualization scheme. With the PumpSpark Fountain Development Kit, we see an opportunity to create a personalized drink using the measured heartbeat data of an individual during physical activity. We describe a prototype system called TastyBeats where one or two participants engage themselves in a fluidic spectacle of creating a mocktail that matches their heartbeats. Our work expands the view of visualizing physical activity beyond virtual screen by providing a real-time and interactive visualization of heart beat data. The TastyBeats induces an active engagement of the player with representation of personal heartbeat in the form of a mocktail created by mixing different flavors together.

SoPhy: Smart Socks for Video Consultations of Physiotherapy

While physiotherapists are increasingly organizing video consultations, assessment of lower body movements over video remains a challenge. We present a wearable technology, SoPhy that captures and presents information related to three key aspects of lower limb movements - range of foot movement, weight distribution and foot orientation. SoPhy consists of a pair of socks embedded with sensors for the patients to wear, and a web-interface that displays the captured information to physiotherapists in real-time. The objective of this demonstration is to offer first-hand experience of SoPhy and to create conversations around designing technologies for supporting bodily communication in video consultations.

Power of friends: when friends guess about their friends' guess

Friendsourcing games aim to collect useful information about individuals by targeting their socially connected groups or friends. The current method of eliciting information is to pose direct questions to friends and expect a truthful response in return. However, such an approach not only becomes monotonous after some time but also suffers from problems like social awkwardness and reticence and thus, affecting the accuracy of the generated responses. In this paper, we present Power of Friends, a novel approach to friendsourcing games, which involves identifying the unanimous opinion of all the friends about a question related to an individual. We tested our proposed approach with seven different groups and were able to generate 47 facts about members of the selected groups. Participants particularly enjoyed the guesswork and interactive elements of the game. Based on the feedback obtained from the study, we propose four strategies for designing similar friendsourcing games.