Prototyping Assignment #1

The purpose of this assignment is to get you thinking critically about how to measure a health-related behavior of interest to you and brainstorming about how that measure might be converted to the Pebble as a microinteraction survey.

• Pick a health-related behavior (or state) that you think is important to measure in the field, either to improve health research or to create more effective health interventions that you can find in one of the NIH toolkits for behavior measurement. If you are uncertain about whether your behavior is a good choice, please run the idea by Stephen. It should be a behavior or state that we might want to measure repeatedly. You may use the same behavior you picked for Assignment 1 as long as you can find measurement tools for that behavior in one or more of the toolkits.
  
• Conduct (or extend, if you picked this behavior for Assignment 1) a thorough literature search on the measurement of this behavior. You will look for two types of instruments:
  • "Traditional" instruments. These are likely to be paper-based instruments. Follow the same procedure you used in Assignment 1, although you will have at least one instrument available from the toolkit that experts have identified as a reasonable choice today. You are particularly interested in the origins of the toolkit survey: why was it chosen and how was it created and validated? Go back to the source of the instrument, reading the paper(s) mentioned in the toolkit listing carefully. Figure out everything there is to know about this particular survey because that will impact your argument on how you might change it.
  • "Emerging" instruments. These are new instruments that are likely to use new technologies to measure the behavior. Search for research articles in the medical or psychology literature, but also the engineering and computer science literature (e.g., IEEE, ACM Digital Library, and Springer databases). Find examples of new ways of measuring the behavior. These articles may help you think creatively about how to measure the construct using microinteractions. Be sure you have done all the readings on EMA technologies!
• As you did in Assignment 1, make a list of all the research articles you have found and put the articles into the class Mendeley library with appropriate keywords (including one keyword, which is your name). For each article, provide all the reference information for the paper (title, author, journal, pages, etc.) and, if it is available online, a link to the article in the class Dropbox. For articles not available online, provide a hardcopy if possible. Whenever possible, find the actual questions used in the paper surveys. In 1-3 paragraphs for each article's entry in Mendeley, explain why you think the article is important for someone trying to understand the behavior you have selected and the history of how that behavior has been measured, or how the behavior may be measured in the future. (Stephen will email information about how we will use Mendeley and Dropbox).
• Now comes the fun part. Based on our class discussion, develop a specific suggestion for how you will use the Pebble to gather data on the behavior. Using the Pebble screen template and paper prototyping, design the actual survey. Do some quick paper prototyping (as discussed in the Rettig article and in class) with at least one friend or and revise your ideas as necessary.
• Turn in scans of your design, and no more than two written pages (11 point font) that justify your design choices and design thinking and support your proposed new method for gathering behavior data using the Pebble watch. Be as systematic as you can about the options you considered and the challenges. Explain how you get around some of the limitations we discussed and why (considering how the original instrument was validated) those changes might be reasonable to make and eventually test. On your summary include: (1) Your name, email, department, and year in school. (2) A few sentences on why it is important to measure the behavior you picked and why you picked that behavior, (3) A link or links to the relevant toolkit pages on on measuring the behavior, and (4) your argument. Also turn in your annotated bibliography via Mendeley (i.e., all the tagged new papers you found in the course of doing this assignment).

Please be prepared to discuss your design ideas in class.

In addition to bringing a hardcopy of your 2-page write-up to class, send an email of both parts of the assignment to ...@neu.edu. Name the file in this format: [your last name].research2.pdf.