IU Indianapolis ScholarWorks :: Browsing by Author "Brady, Erin"

Browsing by Author "Brady, Erin"

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A Model of Project Continuation in Game Jams and Hackathons
(2024-08) Faas, Travis Byron; Miller, Andrew; Dombrowski, Lynn; Brady, Erin; Hickey, Daniel
Game jams and hackathons are events where individuals design and build new technology prototypes in a short timeframe. Prototypes made at hackathons are often abandoned after the event and are never finished or used by their intended audiences. Though continued work on prototypes is not the only goal of hackathons, many expect that some hackathon projects will continue to be developed to fulfill the civic, educational, or entrepreneurial goals of hackathon organizers and attendees. To assist hackathon organizers in running hackathons that produce continued projects, I present in this document a model of project continuation in online hackathons and a tool that directs conversations that develops the necessary components of continuation. This model was developed through three studies: a design study that generated the design for a bot to be used in an online game jam that directs users in breaking the boundedness of their game concept, a deployment study where the bot was deployed and used in an online game jam, and a longitudinal study that followed the continuation practices of individuals who used the bot during the jam. In the presented continuation model, I highlight how recent personal interests generate an extended development context that reduces the boundedness of game jams and show how regular sharing and discussion of progress creates social investment in the success of projects that contributes to continuation intention and support. This continuation model requires a resting period post-hackathon, which sometimes generates conceptual continuation where a project is abandoned but the major project concepts are explored in later projects. Taking this idea of concept continuation further, I offer suggestions on how to gain continuation in hackathons by reducing their time-boundedness and making the events more permeable to allow for prior-existing projects to be accepted and further developed at these events.
#accessibilityFail: Categorizing Shared Photographs of Physical Accessibility Problems
(ACM, 2016-10) Li, Hanlin; Brady, Erin; Department of Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing
Social media platforms are existing online spaces where users share their daily encounters, providing a large dataset of photographs of inaccessible environments. We analyzed 100 posts from Twitter and Instagram that describe accessibility problems. Our findings suggest these posts are helpful to locate, identify and communicate accessibility problems, and provide design ideas for potential assistive technologies. We suggest design implications using social media posts to improve physical accessibility.
Achieving Practical and Accurate Indoor Navigation for People with Visual Impairments
(ACM, 2017) Ahmetovic, Dragan; Murata, Masayuki; Gleason, Cole; Brady, Erin; Takagi, Hironobu; Kitani, Kris; Asakawa, Chieko; Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing
Methods that provide accurate navigation assistance to people with visual impairments often rely on instrumenting the environment with specialized hardware infrastructure. In particular, approaches that use sensor networks of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons have been shown to achieve precise localization and accurate guidance while the structural modifications to the environment are kept at minimum. To install navigation infrastructure, however, a number of complex and time-critical activities must be performed. The BLE beacons need to be positioned correctly and samples of Bluetooth signal need to be collected across the whole environment. These tasks are performed by trained personnel and entail costs proportional to the size of the environment that needs to be instrumented. To reduce the instrumentation costs while maintaining a high accuracy, we improve over a traditional regression-based localization approach by introducing a novel, graph-based localization method using Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) and particle filter. We then study how the number and density of beacons and Bluetooth samples impact the balance between localization accuracy and set-up cost of the navigation environment. Studies with users show the impact that the increased accuracy has on the usability of our navigation application for the visually impaired.
ActVirtual: Making Public Activism Accessible
(ACM, 2017-10) Bora, Disha; Li, Hanlin; Salvi, Sagar; Brady, Erin; Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing
Technology-mediated public activism has grown popular in recent years with the high uptake of social media. Facebook and Twitter have become venues for activists to participate in online activism, or organize offline activism events. However, due to accessibility barriers in physical environments and accessibility issues in social media, people with disabilities continue to face challenges when they engage with such social movements. We interviewed 22 disabled activists about how they used technology to mediate civic engagement and barriers they faced. We present preliminary findings from these interviews and describe a potential solution named ActVirtual, a mobile platform for accessible activism. Our future work will include implementing and testing ActVirtual with users to make online and offline activism more accessible.
Advocacy in Mental Health Social Interactions on Public Social Media
(2022-02) Cornet, Victor P.; Holden, Richard J.; Bolchini, Davide; Brady, Erin; Mohler, George; Hong, Michin; Lee, Sangwon
Health advocacy is a social phenomenon in which individuals and collectives attempt to raise awareness and change opinions and policies about health-related causes. Mental health advocacy is health advocacy to advance treatment, rights, and recognition of people living with a mental health condition. The Internet is reshaping how mental health advocacy is performed on a global scale, by facilitating and broadening the reach of advocacy activities, but also giving more room for opposing mental health advocacy. Another factor contributing to mental health advocacy lies in the cultural underpinnings of mental health in different societies; East Asian countries like South Korea have higher stigma attached to mental health compared to Western countries like the US. This study examines interactions about schizophrenia, a specific mental health diagnosis, on public social media (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) in two different languages, English and Korean, to determine how mental health advocacy and its opposition are expressed on social media. After delineation of a set of keywords for retrieval of content about schizophrenia, three months’ worth of social media posts were collected; a subset of these posts was then analyzed qualitatively using constant comparing with a proposed model describing online mental heath advocacy based on existing literature. Various expressions of light mental health advocacy, such as sharing facts about schizophrenia, and strong advocacy, showcasing offline engagement, were found in English posts; many of these expressions were however absent from the analyzed Korean posts that heavily featured jokes, insults, and criticisms. These findings were used to train machine learning classifiers to detect advocacy and counter-advocacy. The classifiers confirmed the predominance of counter-advocacy in Korean posts compared to important advocacy prevalence in English posts. These findings informed culturally sensitive recommendations for social media uses by mental health advocates and implications for international social media studies in human-computer interaction.
Beyond cute: exploring user types and design opportunities of virtual reality pet games
(ACM, 2017-11) Lin, Chaolan; Dombrowski, Lynn; Faas, Travis; Brady, Erin; Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing
Virtual pet games, such as handheld games like Tamagotchi or video games like Petz, provide players with artificial pet companions or entertaining pet-raising simulations. Prior research has found that virtual pets have the potential to promote learning, collaboration, and empathy among users. While virtual reality (VR) has become an increasingly popular game medium, litle is known about users' expectations regarding game avatars, gameplay, and environments for VR-enabled pet games. We surveyed 780 respondents in an online survey and interviewed 30 participants to understand users' motivation, preferences, and game behavior in pet games played on various medium, and their expectations for VR pet games. Based on our findings, we generated three user types that reflect users' preferences and gameplay styles in VR pet games. We use these types to highlight key design opportunities and recommendations for VR pet games.
A Co-Training Model with Label Propagation on a Bipartite Graph to Identify Online Users with Disabilities
(AAAI, 2019) Yu, Xing; Chakraborty, Sunandan; Brady, Erin; Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing
Collecting data from representative users with disabilities for accessibility research is time and resource consuming. With the proliferation of social media websites, many online spaces have emerged for people with disabilities. The information accumulated in such places is of great value for data collection and participant recruiting. However, there are also many active non-representative users in such online spaces such as medical practitioners, caretakers, or family members. In this work, we introduce a novel co-training model based on the homophily phenomenon observed among online users with the same disability. The model combines a variational label propagation algorithm and a naive Bayes classifier to identify online users who have the same disability. We evaluated this model on a dataset collected from Reddit and the results show improvements over traditional models.
Comparing Crowdsourcing and Friendsourcing: A Social Media-Based Feasibility Study to Support Alzheimer Disease Caregivers
(JMIR Publications, 2017-04-10) Bateman, Daniel Robert; Brady, Erin; Wilkerson, David A.; Yi, Eun-Hye; Karanam, Yamini; Callahan, Christopher M.; Psychiatry, School of Medicine
BACKGROUND: In the United States, over 15 million informal caregivers provide unpaid care to people with Alzheimer disease (AD). Compared with others in their age group, AD caregivers have higher rates of stress, and medical and psychiatric illnesses. Psychosocial interventions improve the health of caregivers. However, constraints of time, distance, and availability inhibit the use of these services. Newer online technologies, such as social media, online groups, friendsourcing, and crowdsourcing, present alternative methods of delivering support. However, limited work has been done in this area with caregivers. OBJECTIVE: The primary aims of this study were to determine (1) the feasibility of innovating peer support group work delivered through social media with friendsourcing, (2) whether the intervention provides an acceptable method for AD caregivers to obtain support, and (3) whether caregiver outcomes were affected by the intervention. A Facebook app provided support to AD caregivers through collecting friendsourced answers to caregiver questions from participants' social networks. The study's secondary aim was to descriptively compare friendsourced answers versus crowdsourced answers. METHODS: We recruited AD caregivers online to participate in a 6-week-long asynchronous, online, closed group on Facebook, where caregivers received support through moderator prompts, group member interactions, and friendsourced answers to caregiver questions. We surveyed and interviewed participants before and after the online group to assess their needs, views on technology, and experience with the intervention. Caregiver questions were pushed automatically to the participants' Facebook News Feed, allowing participants' Facebook friends to see and post answers to the caregiver questions (Friendsourced answers). Of these caregiver questions, 2 were pushed to crowdsource workers through the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. We descriptively compared characteristics of these crowdsourced answers with the friendsourced answers. RESULTS: In total, 6 AD caregivers completed the initial online survey and semistructured telephone interview. Of these, 4 AD caregivers agreed to participate in the online Facebook closed group activity portion of the study. Friendsourcing and crowdsourcing answers to caregiver questions had similar rates of acceptability as rated by content experts: 90% (27/30) and 100% (45/45), respectively. Rates of emotional support and informational support for both groups of answers appeared to trend with the type of support emphasized in the caregiver question (emotional vs informational support question). Friendsourced answers included more shared experiences (20/30, 67%) than did crowdsourced answers (4/45, 9%). CONCLUSIONS: We found an asynchronous, online, closed group on Facebook to be generally acceptable as a means to deliver support to caregivers of people with AD. This pilot is too small to make judgments on effectiveness; however, results trended toward an improvement in caregivers' self-efficacy, sense of support, and perceived stress, but these results were not statistically significant. Both friendsourced and crowdsourced answers may be an acceptable way to provide informational and emotional support to caregivers of people with AD.
Crowdsourcing Accessibility: Human-Powered Access Technologies
(Now, 2015) Brady, Erin; Bigham, Jeffrey P.; Department of Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing
People with disabilities have always engaged the people around them in order to circumvent inaccessible situations, allowing them to live more independently and get things done in their everyday lives. Increasing connectivity is allowing this approach to be extended to wherever and whenever it is needed. Technology can leverage this human work force to accomplish tasks beyond the capabilities of computers, increasing how accessible the world is for people with disabilities. This article outlines the growth of online human support, outlines a number of projects in this space, and presents a set of challenges and opportunities for this work going forward.
Designing Auditory Feedback from Wearable Weightlifting Devices
(ACM, 2018-04) Pan, Mengyue; Salvi, Sagar; Brady, Erin; Human-Centered Computing, School of Informatics and Computing
While wearable devices for fitness have gained broad popularity, most are focused on tracking general activity types rather than correcting exercise forms, which is extremely important for weightlifters. We interviewed 7 frequent gym-goers about their opinions and expectations for feedback from wearable devices for weightlifting. We describe their desired feedback, and how their expectations and concerns could be balanced in future wearable fitness technologies.

Browsing by Author "Brady, Erin"

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