Week 5, Part 1: Monday, June 19 – Wednesday, June 21

Over the weekend we spent time exploring Bloomington. Even though I go to IU, there is a lot of Bloomington I haven’t experienced, and it is cool to try new things. We went to the Bloomington Arts Fair on the Square, an art show featuring local and national artists, as well as Taste of Bloomington , which was an awesome chance to try lots of different Bloomington restaurants in one location. Both events were a lot of fun, and a cool way to experience more of Bloomington.

Monday morning we had the incredible opportunity to work with the SoIC Summer Camp campers to teach them all about paper circuits. The REU is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, which encourages researchers to participate in outreach activities to educate others about research and the scientific community. We spent the morning working with the campers as they learned how circuits work and got the chance to create their own circuits. Both groups I worked with had lots of creative ideas on how to design their paper circuits, from cards to racetracks to rings that lit up. It was a lot of fun to work with the campers, and I can’t wait to get to do it again in a few weeks with the Girl Scout camp. The first picture below is of the campers hard at work, and the second is a selfie with my second group (they were very enthusiastic at the idea of taking this picture).

SummerCampWorking.JPG   Summer Camp Selfie.JPG
Monday afternoon Sergio and I met with Tom to go over and discuss the results of the first
patient test that we took in Dedoose last Friday. It was important for us to sit down and discuss segments where we did not all code it the same and determine what the correct code was. This process allows us to iterate and improve on our definitions in our codebook, as well as to improve our understanding of the codes and our data. After our first test we had achieved an interrater score of 0.5, which means that we agreed on the codes for about half of our segments. These discussions were difficult as we all had to come to an agreement on how we placed each code, but they were valuable conversations that allowed us to realize places where our codebook was weak and needed to be improved.
After making it through half of the segments we needed to discussed, we switched gears to start creating our IRB for our focus group study. We are planning to conduct 2 focus group sessions with health care providers to brainstorm ideas for designing technology to help patients with DCCs manage their conditions. It was interesting to see how the process of drafting the IRB worked and to help Tom draft ours.
Tuesday morning we met up again with Tom to finish discussing our first patient test. We also created our third draft of our codebook. From this we worked to pull out the major problems and solutions which patients encountered when trying to manage their conditions. We also pulled out the problems and solutions which providers felt prevented patients from effectively managing their conditions. These problems and solutions will be what we base our conversations on during the focus group study. The pictures below are of our problems and solutions from both patient and provider perspectives.
Patient Prob:Sol.JPGProvider Prob:Sol.JPG
Tuesday afternoon we met with Dr. Clawson and Dr. Shih to discuss the progress we had made on the research and to figure out where we wanted to go next. We discussed the problems and solutions we had identified, and discussed what points we may want to explore. We also discussed our next steps. We plan to submit our IRB for the focus group study by Thursday, and currently have our first focus group session tentatively scheduled for next Thursday. We also plan to continue working on finishing analyzing our patient data and writing the paper based on the paper data. In terms of the overall plan for this research, we plan to write at least 3 papers – one analyzing the patients data, one analyzing the providers data, and one discussing our focus groups and participatory design sessions, as well as any technology we develop as a result of that. These papers could potentially be submitted to conferences such as CHI, Pervasive Health, or DIS (Designing Interactive Systems). If we decide to submit to CHI, we would most likely submit as part of the Student Research Competition, which would require Sergio and I to submit our paper by January 15, 2018. The nice part of this is that submitting it this way is non-archival, which means that we would be able to publish a longer version of the paper alongside Tom and the other authors in another conference. If the papers are submitted to Pervasive Health 2018, they will have to be submitted by early February 2018. If they are submitted to DIS 2018, the submission date is in early January 2018. This gives us time to continue working on and improving the papers even after the REU experience ends before they are submitted to conferences.
After this meeting I spent the rest of the afternoon working on editing our Related Work and Methods section based on the peer reviews we received. To do this we created a Reviewer Response Table (which you can see here). This table allows us to track comments received, discuss potential solutions, and keep track of what changes we make to our papers.
Wednesday morning we went and took our second patient test in Dedoose, this time looking at the segments from patient 4 through patient 8. After I finished this, I spent time working on our paper. This week we had to draft our Abstract, and outline our Findings section and Discussion section. I found the abstract to be the trickiest part of the paper, as there is a lot of information that we need to convey in as few words as possible.
I also spent time on Wednesday morning drafting an Informed Consent form and recruitment flyer for our focus group study, as these are documents that we have to submit with our IRB. I then worked on improving my personal website, which you can visit at gcantor9.wixsite.com/gabriellecantor. One of the things we have discussed regularly during the REU experience is the importance of having a professional online presence, and having a personal website is one way to do it.
As we move into the second half of the week, our primary goal is to finish analyzing the patient data in Dedoose. This will allow us to move on to the next stage of our research, and still have plenty of time to write an awesome paper. It will be exciting to finish this part of our research, and hopefully we can get it done soon!