Concept Paper

The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with experience with scientific writing. You will write a short academic paper explaining your team's idea. You will also start developing a plan for how the device could be evaluated.

• Write a 4 page paper (SIGCHI format) (including references). The paper should clearly describe the idea your team is pursuing for improving health or healthcare using personal health informatics. The paper should include references to relevant scientific literature and a description of the problem(s) the technology might solve, the technical innovation the project would demonstrate, and the technical implementation challenges that might be encountered with suggestions for how they could be overcome. The paper will be evaluated on how well the idea proposal shows evidence that a thorough background literature review has been done and the details of a particular idea thought through. This paper might ultimately become the base for another paper you might submit to a conference at a later date, once a solution has been built and evaluated.
• The paper should should show evidence of careful thought, a careful literature review, and strong writing in terms of clarity, grammar, spelling, and overall organization.
• Someone who reads your paper should feel like they fully understand...
  • The problem you propose to solve
  • Why the problem has not been solved
  • Why new opportunities created by the innovative technology being used (e.g., Google Glass, smartwatch, Echo, etc.) will allow you to solve the problem
  • The idea you are actually proposing (i.e., how the technology might work)
  • How the idea could be evaluated in a small-scale experiment
  • Anticipated challenges
• Please use Endnote. For all references used, assemble a directory of PDFs of those papers using the default Endnote naming convention.

Hand in the following:

• A copy of your paper as a Word document and PDF document.
• A list of references that others in the class may benefit from, with a link to a dropbox with the papers nicely organized.

Send an email with your paper to ...@neu.edu. Name the file in this format: [your last name].conceptpaper.pdf.

Grading:

You will receive this paper back, edited, within 4 business days of turning it in. Although it is not due until just before Thanksgiving, you may wish to turn this in earlier, because in the later part of the course you will likely be extremely busy working with your team on the prototype.