Assistive Tech Fall 2005

Your reading summary should be turned in two days before the class in which the paper will be discussed. You should turn it in by email to the entire class (I will email everyone a list of who to send it to).

A reading summary should give an overview of a paper, and discuss its positives and negatives and what you learned from it.

You should begin with a full reference for the paper, and your name. Then start by summarizing the main point of the paper. If you disagree with the authors about the main point, you should make a note of what they thought the main point was as well.

Next, you should give a basic overview of what the authors did.

Last, you should give your reaction to the paper. Up until now, your summary should be mostly objective, now you can be subjective. What did you like or dislike about the paper? Why? Did it inspire new ideas in you? Did you think it was relevant to a project you care about? What questions did it raise for you? These are things that may become discussion points in class.

Example summary

Designing Capture Applications to Support the Education of Children with Autism Gillian R. Hayes, Julie A. Kientz, Khai N. Truong, David R. White, Gregory D. Abowd (Georgia Institute of Technology), and Trevor Pering (Intel Research, Santa Clara) in Proceedings of Ubicomp 2004. http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~gillian/research/Hayes-Autism-Ubicomp2004.pdf

Prepared by: Jen Mankoff & Scott Hudson

What do I think the main point of this work is?

The main point of this paper is the application of capture and access to a messy, complex, real-world situation (supporting various stakeholders in tracking and providing therapy for children with autism) and an analysis of the lessons that came out of that experience. This paper provides a model for the realistic, iterative design of Ubicomp applications. A secondary point is the increased understanding of the needs and issues of the domain the researchers studied (autism), and the role computation and ubicomp might play there and more generally in medical/therapy domains.

What do the researchers think the main point of this work is?

The researchers do not clearly set out in the abstract what they believe their main point to be (see the overview paragraph for a better summary). Key issues seem to be (1) understanding of the domain and (2) the inclusion of the caregiver perspective and the impact of social, practical (e.g. finance issues) and technical considerations on capture and access. The implication is that this suggests broader (than just the domain) implications for capture and access.

Basic overview:

• The paper describes extensive formative studies, and summarizes a few of the key results from these studies that led to their prototype designs. Other results are presented throughout the paper as they describe details of the designs.
• Next, three prototypes are motivated and described, with one small figure showing screen images of each. Descriptions give a feeling for how the prototypes are used, but not full details.
• Last, a lengthy section of the paper describes "social, practical, and technical considerations" drawing from experience using the prototypes, and (I think) the formative studies. Some key points presented in this section
  • an overview of the typical "care cycle" in the domain
  • the need for rich, narrative data
  • an eloquent argument for actually considering financial constraints
  • standard privacy stuff
  • variations on the theme that flexibility is necessary

My reaction

Supporting children with autism and their caregivers appears a very promising application area for Ubicomp, but has not previously received any attention in this community. It provides an area where existing practice already makes extensive use of information gathering and which would seem to be a place where this kind of technology could have a substantial impact. In addition, it offers a solid real-world setting which offers a number of substantial practical challenges that haven't been attacked by prior work.

I think this is exciting work, and I'm really curious to see what happens when the authors take the next step and build something that can go through a longer-term deployment

I'm curious if caregiver support might be an area worth exploring for other disabilities. I'm also curious how their outcomes might change for different age groups.