Tamanna Motahar, PhD

HCI and Accessibility Researcher

Design and Evaluation of a "Chairable" Personal Informatics System for People with Severe Motor Disabilities


The use of Personal Informatics (PI) in consumer need space is growing in popularity because it allows people to interact with their data, foster self-awareness, and achieve life goals. While PI is well explored in the Human-Centered Computing (HCC) research domain, they fail to include underrepresented populations, such as people with different level of motor disabilities (e.g., individuals with spinal cord injury/ upper body impairment/ powered wheelchair users). My research aims to bridge this research gap by employing a user-centric lens to answer the following research question: How do individuals with motor disabilities engage with personal informatics systems in daily life? This question includes how people with limited functional abilities can capture self-tracked data, how they want to see and reflect on their recorded data, and what insights they may draw from their tracked data. My research aims to design accessible PI systems based on my deep investigation of user experience data. 
With the collaboration of Craig Neilson Rehabilitation Hospital, we designed and developed a first-of-a-kind power wheelchair (PWC) based multi-modal self-tracking system to support individuals with a recent spinal cord injury to track their performance of pressure reliefs---a very frequent self-care activity to prevent pressure ulcers. We deployed this system with nine in-patient participants of a rehabilitation hospital and qualitatively evaluated their interactions with audio, visual, and haptic reminder modalities through observations and interviews. Our deployment and evaluation demonstrate the feasibility of creating chairable self-tracking systems to help facilitate independence and self-awareness of their self-care activity and the potential for personal informatics systems to be effectively designed so that they are useful for this population.