|
July 2009
Assistant Professor Katie Siek
was recently awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award by the
National Science Foundation. The Program is a Foundation-wide activity that
offers the NSF's most prestigious awards in support of the early
career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively
integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their
organization. Such activities build a firm foundation for a lifetime of
integrated contributions to research and education. Siek's work is titled
CAREER: Health Bridge: Motivating Personal Health Record Adoption by Low -Income Communities.
The increase in obesity and related chronic illnesses has motivated academic,
government, and commercial sectors to address this epidemic. Assistive
technology interventions provide an inexpensive method to disseminate
information, track health metrics, and give personalized feedback on outcomes
for individuals. However the effectiveness of these interventions is limited
for low-income communities because the interventions have been designed with
little consideration for the social and environmental context of health-related
behaviors. Personal Health Records (PHRs) can assist individuals receive
personalized feedback and authoritative health information, but have not been
widely adopted because of privacy, usability, and updating issues. The research
objectives of this proposal are to discover how to integrate PHRs into everyday
life and empower individuals to confidently secure their PHR data with privacy
interfaces. The research is relies upon community-based, iterative,
participatory design activities including contextual interviews, design
workshops, shadowing, and iterative evaluation of prototypes to develop a
integrative PHR framework called Health Bridge.
The research supporting Health Bridge includes community building, curriculum
design, and K-12 outreach activities. Dr. Siek and the
Wellness Innovation and Interaction Lab
will collaborate with
The Bridge Project
to design Health Bridge. Research methodology and results will be integrated
into her established health related course and specialized undergraduate
curriculum in health related informatics. In addition, Dr. Siek and her
students will help increase the pipeline of future informaticians by developing
outreach materials that will be distributed by the
National Center for Women & Information Technology
and the
Computer Science Teachers Association
Roadshow initiatives.
The approximately $608,962 award is expected to fund the research over
a five-year period.
|
