Ongoing research areas

Human-Centered Design for Mental Health Interventions

Evidence-based psychosocial interventions are typically designed to perform well in controlled research settings. These same interventions often fail to be adopted or used effectively in practice — making them unavailable in the community settings where most people actually seek mental health care. At the UW ALACRITY Center, we apply human-centered design and implementation science to adapt interventions for different user groups, contexts, and delivery formats, with the goal of increasing their usability, engagement, adoption, and ultimately their real-world efficacy.

A core contribution of this research is a set of methods and frameworks that help designers and implementation scientists collaborate. This work spans non-digital and digital interventions; while human-centered design principles apply across both, the considerations for each differ in important ways.

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Advancing Critical Flicker Fusion as a Biomarker for At-Home Health Monitoring

Critical flicker fusion frequency (CFF) — the threshold at which a flickering light appears steady — is a neurophysiological measure that reflects cognitive function without the confounds of many psychometric tests. My collaborators and I have developed Beacon, a portable, smartphone-paired device that makes CFF self-administrable outside clinical settings, with particular application to screening for hepatic encephalopathy in patients with chronic liver disease and cirrhosis.

Our work spans device design, clinical validation, and real-world deployment. We have shown that patients can reliably self-administer CFF measurements at home, with strong agreement with established clinical instruments, and that measurements remain stable across varied home environments and times of day. This line of work contributes to broader efforts to move validated clinical biomarkers into patients' homes, and surfaces design considerations relevant to researchers building longitudinal health monitoring tools.

Learn more about our work on Beacon →

Applying Personal Data for Health and Other Goals

As people continue to adopt technology-based self-tracking devices and applications, questions arise about how personal informatics tools can better support self-tracker goals. Thus far, improvements to our capabilities for sensing and collecting data have vastly outpaced self-trackers' abilities to make sense of this data.

In this project, we examine self-trackers' goals and how technology can better support them. Thus far, we have designed cuts — a subset of collected data with some shared feature — and corresponding visualizations. Combinations of cuts and visualizations offer more actionable feedback than many current lifelog visualizations, but more work is needed to determine which cuts make sense for which goals, users, and contexts, and how and when to best present them. This project was supported by the National Science Foundation under award NSF IIS #1553167, the National Library of Medicine, and the University of Washington under an Innovation Research award.

Many people also turn to experts — such as their family physician — for support understanding, interpreting, and acting on their personal informatics data. Unfortunately, few consumer applications are designed for this use, and so people commonly report frustrating experiences with shared interpretation. In a project funded by the Agency for Health Research Quality (1R21HS023654), colleagues and I studied current practices, and ways to improve them, for sharing lifelog data for two chronic conditions: overweight/obesity and irritable bowel syndrome. In a project funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), we examined the broader opportunities for patient generated health data to transform healthcare.

Collaborative uses of personal data can also reinforce, change, or even challenge existing power asymmetries, a topic we examined through study of the adoption of tracking technologies by collegiate sports teams.

Past projects

Social Software for Wellness

My early work on personal informatics and health interventions examined how social features in digital health tools can help people access emotional, instrumental, and informational support; strengthen accountability; and create shared experiences. But early commercial implementations often invited sharing in ways that violated social norms, producing disappointing and awkward interactions. By building and evaluating a series of research prototypes — Three Good Things, GoalPost, GoalLine, Commit to Steps, Crumbs, and Yarn — my research identified design patterns that support the benefits of social features while avoiding the pitfalls. Post-doctoral scholar Laura Pina also led an examination of tracking, sharing, and coordination among families, including the design and deployment of DreamCatcher.

This research was funded by Intel, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School, and the University of Washington Royalty Research Fund.

Highlighted publications:

Learn more about my research on Social Software for Wellness →

BALANCE: Enhancing Diversity in News and Opinion Aggregators

Aggregators such as Digg, Reddit, and Google News rely on ratings and links to select and present subsets of the large quantity of news and opinion items generated each day. The goals of this research were to: 1) form alternative measures of diversity for result sets; 2) develop algorithms for selecting result sets that jointly optimize for diversity and popularity; 3) assess the impacts of alternative selection and presentation methods on people's willingness to use an aggregation service, their exposure to diverse opinions, and the size of their argument repertoires. The result provided a better understanding of alternative notions of what it means for a set of items to be diverse, and the range of reactions that different people have to varying levels and presentations of diversity. This project was funded by NSF grant #IIS-0916099.

Learn more about BALANCE →

Online Political Discussions in Non-Political Spaces

Political theorists have articulated normative ideals for political deliberation. Theorists argue that democracy flourishes in societies where political discussion is frequent and frequently approaches these deliberative ideals: such societies will make better collective choice on important matters at all levels of government, and those choices will have greater public legitimacy.

I hypothesize that, although political discussion is less frequent in spaces where people have connected for non-political reasons, when it does occur the political discussion may be closer to deliberative ideals. People who have come together for a non-political reason may have diverse political views, and because they have existing relationships to protect, they may more open to other viewpoints and more willing to do the hard work of formulating their own opinions in ways that they think will appeal to others who do not fully share their own political outlook.

The Prevalence of Political Discourse in Non-Political Blogs. SA Munson, P Resnick. ICWSM 2011.

SI Display

Working with Paul Resnick and Emily Rosengren, I built a public display system for the School of Information. Community members could address posts to the display using their Twitter accounts. The display ran for several years at the School of Information, and SI Master's student Morgan Keys released an open source version of the software.

Thanks and Tweets: Comparing Two Public Displays. SA Munson, E Rosengren, P Resnick. CSCW 2011.

Wikis as a next generation FAQ

This work examines the interrelationship of collaborative authoring software (Wikis) and discussion software (forums, mailing lists, etc) in support communities. Wikis allow for knowledge generated by community members to be aggregated and accessed more efficiently than newsgroup or mailing list archives. Initial work included collection of best practices from one community that uses both wiki and email list channels. Furnishing medical support communities with Wikis allows us observe how these communities adopt, populate, and maintain these tools.

In a third setting, I examined use of a workgroup wiki in the enterprise. Workgroups can struggle with remembering past projects and sharing this information with other groups in the organization. In a case study of the deployment of MediaWiki as a publishing tool for building organizational memory, group members' motivation to document past projects increased. A browsable collection of past projects allowed for discovery of past work, building the reputation of individuals and the workgroup, and development of transactive memory within the workgroup. The “anyone can edit” feature, frequently touted as the main benefit of wikis, had both benefits and drawbacks in this implementation.

Maytag: A multi-staged approach to identifying complex events in textual data

We present a novel application of NLP and text mining to the analysis of financial documents. In particular, we describe an implemented prototype, Maytag, which combines information extraction and subject classification tools in an interactive exploratory framework. We present experimental results on their performance, as tailored to the financial domain, and some forward-looking extensions to the approach that enables users to specify classifications on the fly.

Maytag: A multi-staged approach to identifying complex events in textual data. C Chang, L Ferro, J Gibson, J Hitzeman, S Lubar, J Palmer, SA Munson, M Vilain, B Wellner. Conference of the European Chapter for Computational Linguistics 2006.

Undergrad & masters projects

2006-20072005-20062004-20052003-20042002-20032001-2002