Master Assignment
lifestyle data futures
Type: Master CS
Period: TBD
Student: (Unassigned)
If you are interested please contact :
Background:
Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), also known as chronic diseases, are noninfectious or non-transmissible diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancers, or chronic respiratory diseases [1]. These are usually associated with a person's lifestyle or behavior (for example, bad diet, physical inactivity, smoking). According to the World Health Organization, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are the leading cause of death and disability in the world, causing 41 million deaths every year [2,3]. This is equivalent to 74% of all deaths globally [3]. Various risk factors contribute to NCDs. These include modifiable behavioral risk factors such as physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, and alcohol or tobacco use; metabolic risk factors such as high blood pressure, obesity, high blood glucose levels, and high levels of fat in the blood and environmental risk factors such as air pollution [2-6]. NCDs can be prevented, or the risk can be reduced by managing these risk factors. Communication of the risk factors and stimulating a healthy lifestyle and change in behavior are vital for achieving this. Current means of communicating these risk factors and lifestyle change recommendations are mainly manual or dominantly app-based (either mobile or desktop screen-based apps). While app-based systems are easy to create and deploy, existing research has shown limitations such as display blindness, attention overload through notifications, low recall in content, and lack of social and contextual situated information [7].
Tangible user interfaces (TUIs), Data Physicalisations (physical representations of data) [8] and embedded data representations [9] offer a unique opportunity to address this issue in a different way. This project aims to explore the potential of tangible user interfaces and data physicalizations/ sensifications for:
- communication of data associated with modifiable lifestyle risk factors (e.g. physical activity data, blood sugar level, etc.)
- designing interventions for stimulating lifestyle/ behavior change toward managing risk factors associated with NCDs
- data experiences embedded in everyday spaces >> we are particularly interested in making data and interventions ambient
You will explore various physical, tangible means for communicating risk factors and potential interaction strategies and design future lifestyle data experiences.
Lifestyle Data Futures offers a diverse set of student assignments (MSc thesis, Capita Selecta) and can take various forms (e.g developing interactive systems, exploring how edge devices, sensing and actuation can be used to realize interventions, empirical studies to evaluate interventions, participatory design projects to design potential interventions, etc.).
This thesis calls for students with various diverse backgrounds such as Smart technology, Electrical engineering, Human computer interaction, Interaction technology, Embedded systems, Ubiquitous computing, or Biosignals & Systems, etc.
References:
[1]. United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), (April, 2021). Non-communicable diseases. [Online]. Available at: https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-health/noncommunicable-diseases/, last accesed on 25-11-2023.
[2]. Pan American Health Organization, Regional Office for the Americas of the World Health Organization(n.d.). Noncommunicable Diseases. [Online]. Available at: https://www.paho.org/en/topics/noncommunicable-diseases, last accesed on 25-11-2023.
[3]. World Health Organization, (Sep, 2023). Noncommunicable Diseases. [Online]. Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/noncommunicable-diseases, last accessed on 25-11-2023.
[4]. Al-Maskari, F, United Nations (n.d.). Lifestyle Diseases: An Economic Burden on the Health Services. [Online]. Available at: https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/lifestyle-diseases-economic-burden-health-services, last accesed on 25-11-2023.
[5]. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (Oct 2020). Lifestyle Risk Factors. [Online]. Available at: https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/tracking/topics/LifestyleRiskFactors.htm#anchor_1606671360465, last accessed on 25-11-2023.
[6]. Budreviciute, A., Damiati, S., Sabir, D. K., Onder, K., Schuller-Goetzburg, P., Plakys, G.,, Katileviciute, A., Khoja, S. & Kodzius, R. (2020). Management and prevention strategies for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and their risk factors. Frontiers in public health, 8, 788.
[7]. Brombacher, H., Houben, S., & Vos, S. (2023). Tangible interventions for office work well-being: approaches, classification, and design considerations. Behaviour & Information Technology, 1-25.
[8]. Jansen, Y., Dragicevic, P., Isenberg, P., Alexander, J., Karnik, A., Kildal, J., ... & Hornbæk, K. (2015, April). Opportunities and challenges for data physicalization. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 3227-3236).
[9]. Willett, W., Jansen, Y., & Dragicevic, P. (2016). Embedded data representations. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 23(1), 461-470.