Faculty Bibliography

Neuromuscular impairment requires adherence to a rehabilitation regimen for maximum recovery of motor function. Consumer-grade game controllers have emerged as a viable means to relay supervised physical therapy to patients' homes, thereby increasing their accessibility to healthcare. These controllers allow patients to perform exercise frequently and improve their rehabilitation outcomes. However, the non-universal design of game controllers targets healthy people and does not always accommodate people with disability. Consequently, many patients experience considerable difficulty assuming certain hand postures and performing the prescribed exercise correctly. Here, we explore the feasibility of improving rehabilitation outcomes through a 3D printing approach that enhances off-the-shelf game controllers in home therapy. Specifically, a custom attachment was 3D printed for a commercial haptic device that mediates fine motor rehabilitation. In an experimental study, 25 healthy subjects performed a navigation task, with the retrofit attachment and without it, while simulating disability of the upper limb. When using the attachment, subjects extended their wrist range of motion, yet maintained their level of compensation. The subjects also showed higher motivation to repeat the exercise with the enhanced device. The results bring forward evidence for the potential of this approach in transforming game controllers toward targeted interventions in home therapy.

Recent years are seeing a sharp increase in the availability of personal omic (e.g. genomes, microbiomes) data to non-experts through direct-to-consumer testing kits. While the scientific understanding of human -omic information is evolving, the interpretation of the data may impact well-being of users and relevant others, and therefore poses challenges and opportunities for CSCW research. We identify the information, interaction, and sense-making needs of microbiomic data users, within the broader context of social omics - the sharing and collaborative engagement with data and interpretation. Analyzing users"™ discussions on Reddit"™s r/HumanMicrobiome, we identified seven user needs for microbiome data: reviewing an annotated report, comparing microbiome data, tracking changes, receiving personalized actionable information, curating and securing information, documenting and sharing self experiments, and enhancing the communication between patients and health-care providers. We highlight the ways in which users interact with each other to collaboratively make sense of the data. We conclude with design implications, including tools for better communication with care providers, and for symptom-centered sharing and discussion.

BACKGROUND:Many aspects of our lives are now digitized and connected to the internet. As a result, individuals are now creating and collecting more personal data than ever before. This offers an unprecedented chance for human-participant research ranging from the social sciences to precision medicine. With this potential wealth of data comes practical problems (e.g., how to merge data streams from various sources), as well as ethical problems (e.g., how best to balance risks and benefits when enabling personal data sharing by individuals). RESULTS:To begin to address these problems in real time, we present Open Humans, a community-based platform that enables personal data collections across data streams, giving individuals more personal data access and control of sharing authorizations, and enabling academic research as well as patient-led projects. We showcase data streams that Open Humans combines (e.g., personal genetic data, wearable activity monitors, GPS location records, and continuous glucose monitor data), along with use cases of how the data facilitate various projects. CONCLUSIONS:Open Humans highlights how a community-centric ecosystem can be used to aggregate personal data from various sources, as well as how these data can be used by academic and citizen scientists through practical, iterative approaches to sharing that strive to balance considerations with participant autonomy, inclusion, and privacy.

BACKGROUND:Robot-mediated telerehabilitation has the potential to provide patient-tailored cost-effective rehabilitation. However, compliance with therapy can be a problem that undermines the prospective advantages of telerehabilitation technologies. Lack of motivation has been identified as a major factor that hampers compliance. Exploring various motivational interventions, the integration of citizen science activities in robotics-based rehabilitation has been shown to increase patients' motivation to engage in otherwise tedious exercises by tapping into a vast array of intrinsic motivational drivers. Patient engagement can be further enhanced by the incorporation of social interactions. OBJECTIVE:Herein, we explored the possibility of bolstering engagement in physical therapy by leveraging cooperation among users in an environmental citizen science project. Specifically, we studied how the integration of cooperation into citizen science influences user engagement, enjoyment, and motor performance. Furthermore, we investigated how the degree of interdependence among users, such that is imposed through independent or joint termination (JT), affects participation in citizen science-based telerehabilitation. METHODS:We developed a Web-based citizen science platform in which users work in pairs to classify images collected by an aquatic robot in a polluted water canal. The classification was carried out by labeling objects that appear in the images and trashing irrelevant labels. The system was interfaced by a haptic device for fine motor rehabilitation. We recruited 120 healthy volunteers to operate the platform. Of these volunteers, 98 were cooperating in pairs, with 1 user tagging images and the other trashing labels. The other 22 volunteers performed both tasks alone. To vary the degree of interdependence within cooperation, we implemented independent and JTs. RESULTS:We found that users' engagement and motor performance are modulated by their assigned task and the degree of interdependence. Motor performance increased when users were subjected to independent termination (P=.02), yet enjoyment decreased when users were subjected to JT (P=.005). A significant interaction between the type of termination and the task was found to influence productivity (P<.001) as well as mean speed, peak speed, and path length of the controller (P=.01, P=.006, and P<.001, respectively). CONCLUSIONS:Depending on the type of termination, cooperation was not always positively associated with engagement, enjoyment, and motor performance. Therefore, enhancing user engagement, satisfaction, and motor performance through cooperative citizen science tasks relies on both the degree of interdependence among users and the perceived nature of the task. Cooperative citizen science may enhance motivation in robotics-based telerehabilitation, if designed attentively.