One such group of College Park students—who are completing their high school credits at The Bridge Academy—recently participated in the Georgia Tech design[ED] Lab workshop where they reviewed College Park’s 20-year Comprehensive Plan (2011 – 2031) to identify community issues and create computing technology solutions that could enhance community engagement and increase career opportunities for young people. The students chose to address three key issues from the city’s policy guide: perception of crime, decreasing standardized test scores, and impact of crime on youth.

“For six weeks, the students were exposed to a design-thinking process and tools for creating user-focused technology that gave them an understanding of how to frame and tackle challenges within their community,” says Monet Spells, graduate student in the Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction program and workshop organizer.

Students in the program brainstormed solutions, iterated on the prototypes, and critiqued their peers’ work to come up with three viable technology concepts. These concepts were displayed in February at a special event open to the public at the Museum of Design Atlanta. 

“Giving students an authentic opportunity to present their work—such as at the MODA public exhibit—acts as a motivation for students to engage with learning, take ownership of their projects, and to see their efforts pay off,” says Betsy DiSalvo, assistant professor in Interactive Computing and Spells’ advisor. 

Results included: 

• A physical prototype and supporting mobile application wireframe to change the perception of crime for the benefit of College Park citizens and businesses by highlighting positive things happening in the community.
• A customized test preparation system, using hip-hop music to motivate and prepare students to increase standardized test scores, which could otherwise limit post-secondary and future opportunities.
• A social network to address the impact of crime on College Park youth, by providing tips for resisting peer pressure, sharing community events, and facilitating a healthy relationship with law enforcement.

“It was very important that the students' solutions addressed practical and verified problems in the community,” says Spells. “The College Park Comprehensive Plan allowed us to pursue validated, researched, high-level problem spaces that the community’s elected officials are seeking to address over the next 20 years.”

Spells says the lab also aimed to expose underrepresented minorities to design-thinking as a method to solve important problems and empower young people with the tools to make a difference and inspire change. For example, some students on their own accord are learning the technical skills required to pursue their ideas beyond the workshop by refining their designs and apps.

“The public exhibit brought the work of these young people and their insights about the city to the attention of city council members, who have invited the students to present their ideas in other public forums,” says DiSalvo.

Spells, who will graduate in May, is part of the Culture and Technology Lab at Georgia Tech, directed by DiSalvo, which aims to understand how culture impacts people’s practices with technology and designing new learning interventions with these understandings. Spells was also named the GVU Center’s inaugural Distinguished Master’s Student this academic year for her work with underrepresented minorities and women in technology-enhanced dance performance.

Clint Zeagler and his team presented a paper on their collaborative FIDO project (Facilitating Interactions for Dogs with Occupations) which addressed issues of wearable sensors for working dogs to aid their communication with their handlers.  Four different sensors were developed that could be integrated into dog vests that the dogs could activate.  Three assistance-trained dogs were used to test the on-body interfaces which used canine gestures, such as biting, tugging and nose gestures, to alert their handlers to visual or auditory signals of which the handler might not be aware.  The FIDO research team includes Zeagler, Thad Starner, Melody Jackson and Giancarlo Valentin.  In addition to his work as a research scientist, Clint also teaches a course on wearable product design in the School of Industrial Design. 

James Hallam’s “Haptic Mirror Therapy Glove” is an interactive mirror therapy glove for the treatment of a paretic limb following a stroke.  It allows the user to stimulate the fingertips of their effected hand by tapping the fingers of their unaffected hand using force sensing resistors to trigger linear resonance actuators on the corresponding fingers.  The glove may potentially be useful to stroke survivors and their therapists by encouraging the development of new multi-sensory rehabilitation exercises, which might better help recover lost sensation and strength in their fingers. This project was selected as the “Best Functional Design” during the four day conference.   

People with long-term disabilities and chronic conditions will encounter a unique set of challenges as they get older. But that doesn’t mean they can’t age successfully and safely.

The Georgia Institute of Technology has received a five-year $4.6 million grant to increase understanding of the aging process for people with disabilities and use data gleaned from the study to develop technologies that will benefit them and others.

The grant from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research in the Department of Education will support the interdisciplinary Center on Technologies to Support Successful Aging with Disability (RERC TechSAge).

“This will serve as a major catalyst for understanding the issues at work as well as developing technologies to be used in homes and our communities,” said Professor Jon Sanford, the lead principal investigator who is also director of the Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access (CATEA). “We are focusing on certain groups but this will be useful for all of society.”

The project classifies disabilities as low vision or blind; deaf or hard of hearing; and mobility limitation, such as using a wheelchair or walker. It focuses primarily on adults 50 and older.

“This is an emerging population and we aim to get a full understanding of their different needs,” said Professor Wendy Rogers, a co-principal investigator.

Researchers will assess needs as they relate to work, home, transportation and health care, said Rogers, who leads Georgia Tech’s Human Factors and Aging Laboratory. They will conduct surveys, hold structured interviews and observe participants in different settings.

Technology projects will build on these data. Researchers expect robots will remotely monitor and perform tasks for individuals with disabilities as they age.

Tracy Mitzner, the other co-principal investigator and associate director of the Human Factors and Aging Laboratory, will investigate how telerobotics can support older adults with disabilities by allowing them to remain active and improve their physical strength. It would also help aging adults remain social, Mitzner said.

Another project is expected to result in open source software and hardware that enables robots to better assist people with disabilities as they age, said Charlie Kemp, director of the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech.

Kemp’s project will continue his collaboration with Henry and Jane Evans. Henry Evans lives with quadriplegia. Their original collaboration as part of the Robots for Humanity project resulted in Evans briefly using a mobile robot to shave and scratch his face, pull a blanket over himself and perform other tasks.

In all, the vast project will rely on expertise from multiple research centers at Georgia Tech. In addition to CATEA, the School of Psychology and the Healthcare Robotics Lab, those involved include: the Institute for People and Technology, Aware Home Research Initiative, School of Industrial Design, Center for Geographic Information Systems, Alternative Media Access Center, Interactive Media Technology Center, Human-Centered Computing, the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

Researchers from the Emory Center for Health in Aging and the University of South Carolina will also participate.

In the school’s new Interactive Product Design Lab, Budd’s students work together with students from the College of Computing’s GVU Center to put digital tools to practical use in everyday products. In the lab, the students design games, kitchen utensils and appliances, museum tour equipment and other products.

“It would have taken the GVU students several days to build these models,” Budd said, noting the detailed cuts of the dinosaur figure for the color-sorting game. “With our students and tools on hand, they can laser cut the perfect pieces or rapid prototype 3D assemblies in just a few minutes.”

Likewise, it would have taken his industrial design students considerable time and effort to design and program the sensors needed to operate the more complex games and product systems; thus, the necessity of teamwork.

Recognizing this convergence of expertise, Georgia Tech this semester added Industrial Design as the fourth partner in the interdisciplinary Masters of Human-Computer Interaction (MS-HCI) degree, which focuses on bringing together the broad mix of practical skills and theoretical understandings required to design and implement modern human-computer interfaces.

Georgia Tech has offered the MS-HCI degree since 1997. Until this semester, the degree was offered jointly by the School of Interactive Computing (IC); the School of Literature, Media and Communication (LMC); and the School of Psychology. The addition of a fourth partner – the School of Industrial Design, which recently celebrated its 60^th anniversary – made perfect sense to the degree coordinators.

“From my perspective, it’s a logical thing to happen, and we need a focus on bridging the gap between the physical and the digital,” Budd said. “Over the last 15 years, the merging of technology between physical and digital has grown dramatically.”

Professor Jim Foley, who helped start the degree and is now director, calls it “a natural marriage.”

“The marriage of ID and HCI is driven by computers being embedded in all types of physical products and forms like toys, exercise equipment, ATMs, wearable devices such as glasses and watches and body function sensors, and on and on and on,” Foley said. “So it is only natural that designing things containing computers draw on the skills of both disciplines.”

When computers were first placed into general household and personal objects, little consideration was given about exactly how to incorporate digital elements into the products. But as computing became more ubiquitous, it became evident that more thought, research and care had to be put into creating the whole product as a team and not designing each element independently.

While the computing side brings in the digital elements, the industrial design side has to consider the elements of user experience including form, aesthetics, ergonomics, human factors, materials and even the actual assembly of the product.

And with the MC-HCI program, students – no matter their initial school affiliations – gain full exposure and expertise with all of it.

All 65 of the students enrolled in the program take a common core curriculum , specialization electives from their individual schools, and general electives from the nearly 100 HCI-related courses offered by the four participating schools plus courses in Management, Music Technology, Industrial and Systems Engineering, and even International Affairs . The students do an internship between their first and second years, and work with one of the nearly 50 HCI-related faculty on a master’s project in their second year. They also interact with Atlanta’s lively community of HCI and UX practitioners.

Students interested in applying to the program can visit the online application available here.

In a paper titled “Don’t Mind Me Touching My Wrist,” Georgia Tech researchers reported the results of a case study of interaction with on-body technology in public. Specifically, they surveyed people in both the United States and South Korea to gain cultural insights into perceptions of the use of e-textiles, or electronic devices, stitched into everyday clothing.

For the study, researchers directed participants to watch videos of people silencing incoming phone calls using e-textile interfaces on various parts of their body, including wrists, forearms, collarbones, torsos, waists and the front pant pocket. They were asked to describe their thoughts about the interaction (such as whether it appeared normal, silly or awkward) and its placement on the body.

In general, the study found that in both countries the wrist and the forearm were the most preferred locations for e-textiles, as well as the most normal placement when watching someone use the devices.

“This may be due to the fact that these locations are already being used for wearable technology,” said Halley Profita, a former Georgia Tech industrial design graduate student who led the study. “People strap smartphones or MP3 players to their arms while exercising. Runners wear GPS watches.”

According to the study:

• Gender of the technology user affected opinions about the interaction. For example, Americans were uncomfortable when men used a device located at the front pant pocket region or when women reached for their torsos or collarbones.
• South Koreans reported exceptionally low acceptance of women using the devices anywhere except for their arms.
• Respondents expressed differing views on the most important factors on deciding how to use e-textiles. Americans focused on ease of operation and accessibility; South Koreans raised personal perception issues.

“South Koreans also said they wanted an easy-to-use system, but the technology should not make them look awkward or weird,” Profita said. “This isn’t surprising because their culture emphasizes modesty, politeness and avoidance of embarrassing situations.”

The findings were presented in September at the International Symposium in Wearable Computing in Switzerland. While at Georgia Tech, Profita was advised by Professors Ellen Yi-Luen Do and Thad Starner, a wearable computing pioneer. She is currently a doctoral candidate in computer science at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Henneman, a 1985 Ph.D. graduate of the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, has extensive corporate HCI experience at NCR (director of user-centered design and director of corporate usability), marchFIRST (director of information architecture), Internet Security Systems (chief information architect and manager of usability and user experience), and AT&T (principal – user experience research). He has also worked as an independent consultant and at Georgia Tech in research, administration, and management of an interdisciplinary MS degree program. 

GT's MS-HCI degree, established in 1997 with support from the Sloan Foundation, is widely considered to be one of the best HCI programs in the world. The program graduated it first class in 1998 with three students. This year, the program will graduate 34 students with 40 slated for next year.

Coursework includes HCI principles and practice plus next-generation computationally-mediated application areas such as ubiquitous and mobile computing, learning science and technology, information visualization, civic media, augmented and virtual reality, interactive TV, interactive narrative, and embedded computing product design. All students complete a capstone project with a Tech faculty member.

In accepting the opportunity, Henneman said: "I am so enthused about returning to Georgia Tech to lead this outstanding program.  I am especially excited about the chance to work with the students, faculty, industry partners, and alumni."

“Graduates are in high demand, as companies seek to enhance their web presence and develop innovative new computer-enabled devices, games, toys, appliances, and services,” said Jim Foley, the current director who will continue to work with the program in his role as IC faculty coordinator. “Our program is widely considered to be one of the best in the world; Dick is the right person to maintain and enhance that reputation."

School of Interactive Computing Chair Annie Anton, speaking on behalf of the four schools offering the degree, said: "It is wonderful to have Dick back at Georgia Tech to take this prestigious program to even greater prominence!"