Sarah Ryu, a senior in Human-Computer Interaction, and Jonathan Tan, a senior in Computer Science, won 3rd place in the NJIT Dana Knox Student Research Showcase for their project, “Dot’s World: An Emotional Development Support Platform for Children.” Sarah started the design in her first year at NJIT and this was a culumination of that work. The design of this app was also presented last year (virtually) at the Interaction Design and Children Conference. Congratulations!
We just published our final paper about how people discuss mental health on livestreams! We would never recommend that livestreams replace formal therapy but they can still be useful in lowering stigma, sharing resources and information, giving emotional support to others, etc.
PhD student Jie Cai presented research about how volunteer content moderators “profile” community violators at CSCW, a premier HCI conference on computer supported collaborative work. Jie has been studying the moderation practices of volunteer moderators on Twitch.
Meciel, Jon, and Dr.Wohn attended an energy conference in Houston that had a section about drone use. Saw a lot of cool drones and had some great Texas barbecue.
Congratulations to Meciel Guisihan and Jonathan Tan for being accepted to the NSF icorps mini grant program as student entrepreneurs! They will be developing applications that help human drone communication.
This competitive program allows for students to explore the feasibility of new technologies/businesses through customer discovery. This is the lab’s sixth icorps mini grant!
Jonathan presents the business concept at a meeting of grant recipients
Abstract: This project was started to explore ways we can utilize the benefits of human-robot facilitated therapy to support a child’s emotional development and identify needs for early intervention. As a result, we designed an app prototype called Dot’s World that features a chatbot that leads daily conversations about emotional well-being and facilitates emotional education exercises. We also created a companion app prototype for parents to involve them in their child’s emotional growth and identify needs for early intervention. To understand the current perceptions of emotional health and existing solutions for support, we conducted customer discovery interviews with parents and education professionals like teachers, psychologists, and counselors. Multiple factors in the interview process including variations in technology access as well as confidence in traditional methods of emotional development have led us to pivot our original vision. Interviews with professionals in the education system helped us to realize an apparent need for a platform providing socio-emotional tools for educators and improving communication channels within the child’s support system. We will be iterating on Dot’s World’s design and conducting more interviews to better understand and support the need of this new demographic.