Chap (Continuous Health Awareness Program) was designed to assist aging individuals who spend most of their time at home. My goal was to help individuals capture records of their activities, and view them against captured changes in blood glucose values. Consequently chap relied on motion detection sensors positioned in places of regular activities (couch, dining table, refrigerator, etc.) To capture individuals’ activities. Chap also included a computer-based diary for more detailed activity recordings and glucowatch g2 biographer for high frequency blood sugar capture. Chap was deployed in two households of individuals with diabetes for 2 weeks each. The study revealed the potential benefits and barriers in enabling people to interrogate their own health data. On one hand, it indicated that individuals with over a decade of diabetes experience were able to engage in reflection independently and form relevant questions and hypotheses for investigation. On the other hand, it illustrated that individual discovery did not seem to produce internally reliable knowledge for the participants. Instead, it produced hypotheses that required social validation or confirmation. Mamykina, L., Mynatt, E. D., And Kaufman, D. R. 2006. Investigating Health Management Practices Of Individuals With Diabetes. In Proceedings Of The SIGCHI Conference On Human Factors In Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006). Chi '06. Acm, New York, Ny, 927-936.
	Mahi (Mobile Access To Health Information), extended chap by including not only the means to capture and access personal diabetes records, but also features for engaging in a reflective dialog with diabetes educators. Mahi is a mobile application that uses a mobile phone as the main computational platform and activity capture mechanism: individuals use photo and audio capture capabilities of the phone to record activities of interest. A custom-built bluetooth attachment for a commercial glucose meter allows for connectivity between the phone and the meter and integration of activity records with blood sugar values. Both individuals and their diabetes educators can view the captured records on individuals’ password-protected websites, and engage in a discussion over the meaning of the records. Mahi was deployed with 25 students of the diabetes education center in dover, nj in the summer of 2007. The study demonstrated that mahi succeeded in helping individuals achieve their diabetes management goals (such as introducing changes to their diet). More importantly, mahi inspired participants to adopt an internal locus of control, which is shown to lead to more proactive engagement in self-care by patients. Further details about both the design and the study are described in our previous publication. Mamykina, L., Mynatt, E., Davidson, P., And Greenblatt, D. 2008. Mahi: Investigation Of Social Scaffolding For Reflective Thinking In Diabetes Management. In Proceeding Of The Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference On Human Factors In Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). Chi '08. ACM, New York, NY, 477-486.
	Di-Tag (Diabetes Tagging), further extended the social aspects of chap and mahi and incorporated additional features for sharing data and supporting discourse not just between the educator and the student (newly diagnosed diabetic), but also within a community of experienced diabetics. In addition to data capture features similar to the ones used in mahi, di-tag allowed its users to tag or classify their records (see for example the tag cloud in the screenshot below). To further support social discourse around the captured data, di-tag created a wiki-like environment for its users: each newly created tag automatically created a new wiki-page that listed the records corresponding to the tag and prompted the tag creator to describe their opinions on the captured items. Other individuals could then view the written entries and annotate them to incorporate their own experiences. Di-tag was deployed with 12 individuals, all former students of the diabetes education center over 6 weeks. The study showed that access to the records of others alerted di-tag users to challenges and possibilities they did not encounter in their own experience. In addition, active usage of the tagging feature helped users examine differences in their understanding and start development of a shared vocabulary of diabetes experiences. Mamykina, L., Mynatt, E.D., Designing Pervasive Health Monitoring Applications for Communities of Users, in Extended Abstracts of the Conference on Pervasive Computing, Pervasive 2009, Nara, Japan.
	Fish’n’steps is an application that combines ubiquity and simplicity of pedometers, wearable devices that measure one’s step counts, with the engagement of social computing games. Individuals enrolled in the game use pedometers to measure their daily step count. Fish’n’steps then links the number of steps taken each day to the growth and emotional state of a virtual pet “belonging” to each individual: a fish in a fish-tank. Additional incentives incorporate social dynamics, such as competition between teams of players. “fish’n’steps” was built as a distributed software application that included several functioning components as well as some “wizard of oz” components. Simple commercially available pedometers, sportline 330, were used to measure the step count of individual participants. To collect data from pedometers, individuals placed their pedometer on a platform at a public kiosk, and took a picture of their pedometer screen, including the unique pedometer id. The picture was captured and sent to a member of the research team who entered the appropriate data into a database. This application was developed by a team of my colleagues at Siemens Corporate Research. The fourteen-week deployment study with nineteen participants showed that the game served as a catalyst for promoting exercise and for improving game players’ attitudes towards physical activity. Furthermore, although most player’s enthusiasm in the game decreased after the game’s first two weeks, analyzing the results using Prochaska's Transtheoretical Model Of Behavioral Change (Grimley et al, 1994), suggested that individuals had, by that time, established new routines that led to healthier patterns of physical activity in their daily lives. Lin, J.J., Mamykina, L., Lindtner, S., Delajoux, G., And Strub, H.B. 2006 Fis’n’steps: Encouraging Physical Activity With An Interactive Computer Game, In Proceedings Of Ubicomp 2006, Lecture Notes In Computer Science, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, Volume 4206/2006, Pp. 261-278.
	Time Aura :: historically one of the visions for human-computer symbiosis has been to augment human intelligence and extend people’s cognitive abilities. In this work, I designed two visually-based systems to enhance a person’s ability to flexibly control their pace while engaged in a cognitively demanding activity. In these investigations, i explored pacing interfaces that minimize the cognitive demands for assessing a current pace, provide ambient cues that can be quickly interpreted without incurring significant interruption from the current task, and place knowledge in the world to flexibly support different pacing strategies. Evaluation of the pacing interfaces shows that technology can successfully support pacing. Mamykina, L., Mynatt, E., And Terry, M. A. 2001. Time Aura: Interfaces For Pacing. In Proceedings Of The SIGCHI Conference On Human Factors In Computing Systems (Seattle, Washington, United States). CHI '01. ACM, New York, Ny, 144-151.