People-Aware Computing Lab and an insight to human behavior
What is People-Aware Computing Lab?
People-Aware Computing Lab is a ubiquitous computing lab at Cornel University that focuses on developing mobile sensor systems that can capture, learn, and interpret context, activities to help improve people’s wellbeing. The lab has developed many health technologies to further understand human behavior and its association with health issues. With the technological devices provided by the lab, the lab-created devices would help conduct future health experiments so much easier and accurately. The lab has acquired several Best Paper Awards.
To get a better sense of what kind of products and ubiquitous computing the lab builds, some of the examples of the products that were developed under the People-Aware Computing lab are Alertness Scanner, DoppleSleep, and StressSense. Alertness Scanner is a mobile app that can examine our alertness passively and unobtrusively. The goal is to help us schedule better routines based on evaluations of levels of our alertness. Another product that I think is interesting is DoppleSleep. DoppleSleep uses radar to track body movements, and heart and breathing rates when we are sleeping. The DoppleSleep uses Bluetooth to transmit data to a smartphone app to see how we are sleeping and as a result, to find out if there is an interesting pattern in the way we sleep. The patterns discovered can help us adjust our sleep routine to improve our sleep quality. The next product that I am going to introduce is StressSense. When we are stressed, our voice changes. Based on this fact, the lab has developed StressSense. StressSense is a mobile app that uses microphones that are embedded in mobile phones to detect stress from human voices when they use smartphones. StressSense’s accuracy was 81% for indoor environments and 76% for outdoor environments. StressSense was the first system that use smartphones to detect stress through voice in real-world conversations.
In this post, I am going to introduce research that the lab has done by utilizing a mobile phone app to help understand more about patients’ behavior with Schizophrenia. Other products that I am also going to introduce and have a deeper look at in this post are PuffPacket and Emotion Check, which are developed under the People-Aware Computing Lab. PuffPacket is a device that is piggybacking on e-cigarettes to track the patterns and the usage of electronic nicotine devices. Emotion Check is a watch-like device that can help reduce anxiety. The team is under the supervision of Professor Tanzeem Choudhury, who is an ACM Distinguished Member. (She aims to develop mindless computing technology that understands psychology and biology to enhance our well-being.)
Research had been done at People-Aware Computing Lab
Among all of the research at the lab, in this post, I will focus on the research that I found interesting: the team has done research on finding correlations between different social activities to help people with Schizophrenia. The lab has recognized the problem of the current social functioning assessment is through self-assessments; therefore, the lab proposed a new approach to passively assess patients’ social functioning by using a mobile app called CrossCheck. The research aims to create an alternative to help underprivileged people who do not have proper access to healthcare services to assess their state of mental health. The app will keep track of different aspects such as:
· social engagement/withdrawal (time spent alone or social avoidance)
· interpersonal behavior (relationships and quality of communication)
· prosocial activities (engagement in social activities)
· recreation (engagement in hobbies, interests)
· independence-competence (the ability to independently live)
· independence-performance (performance of skills needed to independently live)
· employment.
The data collected is used to train and test to predict the social behavior of the patients with Schizophrenia. The results from the research painted a clearer picture of how patients’ social behavior changes during a period of time and monitoring their diagnosis. The success of the system prompts the possibility of widespread use of mobile app assistants to help and intervene timely. One case study from this research has prompted the potential of this mobile sensing system to correctly assess and predict the social behavior of the patient.
The products developed under People-Aware Computing Lab
Emotion Check
As Professor Choudhury said, “There’s no blood test for mental health, and it’s such a big issue with huge costs. These technologies can change things”. I think it is interesting that the team helps bridge the gap of what is happening with our mental health by developing technologies that can “read our mind” (in a way). Her team has developed Emotion Check, a watch-like device, to regularly monitor heart rate to regulate their anxiety.
When we realize our heart rate goes up, we are even more anxious. So Emotion Check device will detect when our heart rate goes up and intervene by generating subtle variations on the wrist. These heartbeat simulating variations are subtle that they do not make us notice but they are enough to make us perceive that our heart rate is normal so that we can feel calmer. This can be beneficial for people who often find themselves in a situation where anxiety can affect their performance on a special occasion.
I did my research about current smartwatches on the market, and they have a feature where they can alert their wearers about their high heart rates or low heart rates. I think that it is a possible application for current smartwatches to adopt these features to make their devices more responsive to wearers’ state of mind as they are already configured as a watch.
PuffPacket
Another product that I want to introduce in this post that was developed under the People-Aware Computing Lab is PuffPacket. PuffPacket is a system that includes hardware and software that is developed into e-cigarettes and vapes to study the context, such as where and why people smoke. The hardware part will be attached to the e-cigarette devices, and the hardware will use Bluetooth to transmit signals to send data over to the mobile application. This application can help people who want to quit smoking to understand their habits. Using that understanding can help them better in that journey.
The device sits between the mouthpiece and the heating element. The PuffPacket is activated when the user breathes in. It sees how much a cigarette has burned to evaluate how much nicotine has the user consumed.
The lab has developed this device to improve the quality of research on nicotine usage. Historically, research on cigarette usage is normally based on self-report. The information about time place and context is necessary to understand why and how people smoke and this information has been traditionally recorded self-recorded. However, self-reporting can be questionable as it’s their subconscious habit to smoke and they can’t recall the times when they smoke. This system helped to accurately record the information about the time, place, and context that will help us find the patterns which can explain users’ habits.
Conclusion
People-Aware Computing Lab has developed products that help people understand their habits unobtrusively in the background. PuffPacket, Emotion Check, and the research about behaviors of people with Schizophrenia are some of the examples of development and research done at the lab. The People-Aware Computing Lab has contributed research and devices that can help us conduct further research in the future with accurate data and help us understand human behaviors.
