Selected Research Experience

Research projects

Challenges to self-monitoring of diabetes

Carnegie Mellon University | Fall 2011–Spring 2012 | Advisor: Jodi Forlizzi
What are the social and technological barriers and needs for patients living with diabetes in self-monitoring diabetes? I interviewed 7 diabetes patients and combed through diabetes literature in HCI to identify challenges and next steps for tools that allow patients to monitor diabetes.

Information art as visualization for physical activity

Carnegie Mellon University | Fall 2011–Spring 2012 | Advisor: Jodi Forlizzi
As a result of my research on older adults and physical activity, I created a web application, Spark, which visualizes Fitbit step count data into four dynamic abstract art pieces. I evaluated Spark with 6 participants (3 older adults) in in-situ deployments in their private residences for 2-3 weeks, and generated design considerations for systems that track and visualize physical activity. Early work is presented at the CHI 2012 Personal Informatics in Practice Workshop, and full work is presented at Ubicomp 2012.

Encouraging outdoor physical activity in seniors

Carnegie Mellon University | Summer–Fall 2010 | Advisor: Jodi Forlizzi
Generated design opportunities for HCI research to address barriers to outdoor physical activity by older adults. Conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with 13 older adults to understand the barriers, facilitators, and precipitating events that lead to a change in physical activity behavior. Also did preliminary concept generation and evaluation with 11 seniors.

WiiPaint: Full-body interaction in a collaborative art application

Wellesley College Undergraduate Thesis | Summer 2008–Spring 2009 | Advisors: Panagiotis Metaxas, Orit Shaer, David Olsen
Explored ways in which full-body interaction can be encouraged in a collaborative art application located in a public space such as a museum. WiiPaint sets the context for interaction and experiments with affordance and mapping of Wii Remotes to the interface.

Publications

Fan, C. Forlizzi, J., Dey, A. 2012. Considerations for Technology that Support Physical Activity by Older Adults. In Proceedings of ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. Boulder, CO. ASSETS ’12. ACM Press. New York, NY. [pdf]

Fan, C., Forlizzi, J., Dey, A. 2012. A Spark Of Activity: Exploring Information Art As Visualization For Physical Activity. In Proceedings of Ubiquitous Computing. Pittsburgh, PA. Ubicomp ’10. ACM Press, New York, NY. (19% acceptance rate) [pdf]

Pierce, J., Fan, C., Lomas, D., Marcu, G., & Paulos, E. 2010. Some considerations on the (in)effectiveness of residential energy feedback systems. In Proceedings of DIS Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. Århus, Denmark. DIS ’10. ACM Press, New York, NY. (26% acceptance rate) [pdf]

Shaer, O., Kol, G., Strait, M., Fan, C., Grevet, C., and Elfenbein, S. 2010. G-nome surfer: a tabletop interface for collaborative exploration of genomic data. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI '10. ACM, New York, NY, 1427-1436. (22% acceptance rate) [pdf] [video]