ASU professors Eric Hekler and Winslow Burleson were selected from more than 500 applicants in 50 countries to receive a Google Research Award for their proposal for smart home systems that improve health habits and lifestyle practices.
The team calls the proposal a “DIY Self-Experimentation Toolkit.” Burleson said that through “ubiquitous computing,” or fully integrated systems, the team is developing smart homes that help foster self awareness, actualize personal creativity and create pathways to self-efficacy that lead to human flourishing.
Hekler, an assistant professor in the School of Nutrition and Health Promotion, is the project’s leader. He worked with Burleson, an assistant professor in the School of Computing, Informatics and Decision System Engineering, as well as Google sponsor Bob Evans and Jisoo Lee, a media arts and sciences graduate student.
Hekler said he and Burleson want to help people improve their lives. While Hekler is interested in behavior change related to health, Burleson is more focused on educating and informing people.
“I am interested in the psychology of peak performance and in actualizing individuals to achieve their full potential,” Burleson said. “This involves helping individuals understand the personal projects they are engaged in, how they choose to pursue these, and how these projects interact with one another.”
As an example of the system’s functions, Hekler described a test he did in which the system helped him increase how often he flossed.
Hekler said when he walked into his bedroom, the “Mission Impossible” theme would play from his bathroom. After being reminded of the task, he would walk to the bathroom and interact with the system by using a switch to track when he was flossing. It would “play happy music” for him during the process.
In conjunction with the flossing reminder, he would keep a box of chocolates that the system was also linked to. When going to eat one, if he had flossed the night before, the system would cheer for him; if not, it would “boo” him.
“This idea of behavior change, it all depends on willpower,” Lee said. “Having some small motivation that encourages creativity will let people have a chance to look at their daily life and make changes and have fun too.”
The team’s research will focus on enhancing the system to make it more applicable and personal for people. For example, Hekler said that Burleson has developed a process for allowing people to program the system without any advance programming knowledge.
Hekler said the hard part about the proposed system is knowing how to get people to build their own personalized approach. The system could help people with many home-based routines, such as putting on sunscreen or reducing inactivity. However, Hekler noted that it is a very intrusive concept.
“We don’t necessarily want to be tracking and monitoring,” Hekler said. “Most people wouldn’t want to have something tracking them in the home context, unless they were very aptly involved in designing it so they make sure they are comfortable with it.”
Along with the goal of creating a system that people are comfortable with, the team’s research involves helping people come up with what is appropriate to track. Hekler said the hope is that once people discover something they are interested in tracking, the next stage would be to build a personalized intervention process.
“We don’t want to just make an app and assume we know so much about you that we can know the right solution,” Hekler said. “We want to make the tool so simple to use that pretty much anyone can build these cool, interesting interventions for themselves.”
Hekler said the goal is to have a base form of the system available within a year, but it would not necessarily be a commercially viable product. After that stage, the group would be willing to delve into further research in order to get to that point.
“Once we figure out the basic science and human-computer interaction realm, (we want to) actively pursue really open, more commercialized ways of exploring this,” Hekler said.
Contact the reporter at rebecca.brisley@asu.edu
