Lab News
The Magic Exploration Wand's paper at CHI 2012 is an honorable mention for best paper! Kudos to authors Matt Bonner, Lan Wang and Beth Mynatt. Learn more about the MEW project, which probes how activities shape the work of Child Life Specialists, on our project page. See you in Austin!
Eugene Medynskiy has been named one of Forbes Magazine's "30 under 30" in Technology for his work on the Salud! project, as well as role in Usable Health.
You can view the entire 30 under 30 list using the link above, or jump directly to Eugene's profile.
We were honored to receive a visit from Georgia's First Lady, Sandra Deal. Mrs. Deal is well-known for her activities in outreach, education, and community volunteering. She was interested in learning the SmartMenu, which is a commercialization of nutritional advice research conducted at the ECL. Mrs. Deal's visit began at Tin Drum in Tech Square, where she was able to see the SmartMenus in action. She then visited the Everyday Computing Lab and spoke with the students about their work. Mrs. Deal was accompanied by Beth Mynatt and Jiten Chhabra. The visit was arranged by Georgia Tech’s First Lady, Valerie Peterson.
Members of the Everyday Computing Lab created and deployed a personalized ordering terminal at a local Atlanta restaurant that provided diners with healthy eating suggestions as they placed their order. Preliminary findings show that 1 in 7 diners who ordered from the kiosk changed their order to an item that was closer to the recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2005, in terms of its nutrient balance. These findings have a great bearing on the fight against obesity and other diet related chronic diseases.
In Dec 2010, Jiten presented the preliminary findings of this study at a session called "Extreme Makeover: Nutrition Edition" Consumer Informatics and Technology at the American Dietetic Association's Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo in Boston. Here is a link to a video clip that has the complete audio for the talk superimposed with the slides used for the presentation.
Announcing IPaT, the Institute for People and Technology! Beth Mynatt was recently introduced as the founding executive director of IPaT, a new multi-disciplinary research center at Georgia Tech. IPaT will connect government and private partners with researchers at Georgia Tech, investing in research in areas of major social importance like healthcare, education and consumer media. Learn more about IPaT's work to catalyze researcher and stakeholders engagement by visiting the IPaT website.
Beth's talk at TEDx Peachtree 2010 covered human convergence - the interplay and pushback between new technologies and humans. This back-and-forth is integral to all of our work in the ECL! Watch Beth's here.
ECL members have made several appearances on CNN recently! Beth Mynatt and Jiten Chhabra demoed the Usable Health nutritional advice kiosk. A week later, Jiten was back to show off the Usable Health website. Eugene Medynskiy also demoed his Salud! health-tracking application on Ali Velshi's show.
Usable Health: video 1, video 2
Salud!: video
Usable Health, which is the commercial face of Dr. J Says, was interviewed by a HIT blog. The details can be found here.
Eugene Medynskiy will be presenting the paper Salud!: An Open Infrastructure for Developing and Deploying Health Self-management Applications at the Pervasive Health 2010 conference in Munich, Germany.
Eugene Medynskiy successfully passed his Ph.D. thesis proposal, titled "Interfaces for Supporting Health Self-management," on January 20th, 2010. He is now a Ph.D. candidate in the Human-Centered Computing program.