Research: mobile | metamodeling

My broad and admittedly ambitious goal is to dramatically improve health and well-being through the use of mobile technology. Towards that end, I'm working on answering questions about how mobile technologies can leverage the power of social influence to bring about improvements in health, psychological well being, and health behavior. A second important issue in this same vein, is how these same technologies can be used to improved the frequency and resolution of health data collection for care providers.

I am involved in three research projects that are intended to serve as platforms for answering these questions and will hopefully inform the development of future generations of mobile health applications. These are:

Aurora: Mobile Social Support
Aurora Web Site (in progress, but still cool)

Numerous studies have expounded on the benefits of social support for health, demonstrating improvements in overall quality of life, reductions in anxiety, reductions in perceived pain, increased comfort, and even faster recovery times. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to extensive social support networks or socially supportive therapy groups, and even those who do frequently don't have access when they need it most, such as when sitting in a waiting room or lying in bed awake late at night. To that end, we have created Aurora, a mobile phone-based application that allows patients to quickly and easily share their current mood and emotions with one another. Users select photos that they feel represent their current emotional state, and can likewise view the current emotional state of their peers. Aurora supports a range of forms of communication designed to help each user balance their own privacy with their desire for social interaction, and encourages them to reach out to one another in times of need or maintain distance as appropriate. Users can play games with one another that test their perceptions of the images selected by others, adding depth to the level of engagement and interactivity. This rich interaction, centered on the sharing of emotion, should help a greater number people reap more of the benefits of quality social support. Further, the emotions each patient records in the system on a daily basis represent new and highly frequent data points that can be evaluated by care providers and researchers, and the monitoring of patient emotions on a daily basis could help stave off many potential problems before they arise fully.

Pollak, JP, Adams, P, Gay, G. (To Appear 2011). PAM: A Photographic Affect Meter for frequent, in situ measurement of affect. Proceedings of CHI 2011.

Gay, G., Pollak, JP, Adams, P., Leonard, JP (2011). Pilot Study of Aurora, a Social, Mobile-Phone-Based Emotion Sharing and Recording System. Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology, 5(2), 325-332.

VERA: Health Behavior Mobile Phone App
VERA info-blurb on the IDL website (click the VERA link once you get there)

How can mobile phones can be used to employ various forms of motivation-both social and individual-to encourage healthy behavior? Intrinsic motivators are innate motivational factors such as competition, cooperation, control, and recognition that have been leveraged to bring about behavior change in many circumstances. Social influence has been shown to play an important role in persuasion and the motivation of behavior change; countless studies, both involving technology and not, have shown that individuals grouped with peers have better results in alcohol and smoking cessation, losing weight, exercising, and even surviving cancer. Through good design, all of these motivational factors can be employed and studied in mobile phone applications. We have developed and pilot-tested a health behavior application called VERA in which users take photos to document health-related behaviors, then rate and reflect on their own behaviors as well as those of their peers. Preliminary data show that individuals using VERA exhibit generally healthier behavior than those who don't, and that individuals using VERA with their peers are healthier yet. Furthermore, VERA collects volumes of highly valuable data, explicitly documenting the day-to-day health-related behavior with associated stress and emotional state of participants. This represents great promise for the use of cell phones as a means of encouraging healthier behaviors related to weight loss and the prevention of obesity.

Update: VERA just won multiple BOOM awards! BOOM is Cornell's student design competition. Congratulations to undergrads Vera Khovanskaya, Andy Liang, Andrew Ehrlich, and Stuart Davis who are really responsible for the existence and excellence of VERA and took home awards from Yahoo! and Google.

Mindless Eating Challenge/ Time To Eat! Mobile Game

Mindless Eating Challenge is a mobile phone-based health game based on Dr. Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating Challenge. In the game, players are tasked with caring for a virtual pet or plant, similar to the popular Tamgotchi. Pet care requires the user to follow a variety of health and eating recommendations and verify their actions with photos taken with their phone's camera. For example, the recommendation "Eat a hot breakfast" would require the player to submit a photo of him/ herself eating a bowl of oatmeal. Photos and compliance are then judged either by judges or peers. Based on compliance to these recommendations, the pet or plant changes its appearance and gains features or accessories--a tree might grow taller or grow more leaves or fruit in response. Alternatively, leaves might fall off if the players performance is poor. A social portion of the game allows the user to see various depictions of their performance in comparison to the performance of others in their group, as well as of their group in comparison to other groups. The game is designed so that various features can be easily enabled and disabled so it can be used as a platform from which to conduct research into the mechanisms of mobile persuasion in the context of improving health and well-being.

Read an interview with me on healthGAMERS. Here is the original press release on NPR or Kotaku (for you gamers out there).

This project is in collaboration with the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab and is funded in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Pollak, JP, Gay, G, Byrne, S, Wagner, E, Retelny, D, Humphreys, L (2010). It's Time to Eat! Using Mobile Games to Promote Healthy Eating. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 9(3), 21-27.