Research + Publications

TMS Trainer

Developing a Virtual Training Tool for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

This project was completed during a summer research internship at the Alberta Children's Hospital. During this internship, I was immersed in the Caglary Pediatric Stroke Program's research lab and learned about developing technologies such as variousforms of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI).

My project in particular focused on developing a virtual training tool for teaching nurses and other staff how to perform transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Typically, TMS requires the use of a large, expensive robot, thus making training with the equipment itself very difficult. By developing a virtual training tool that provides information regarding accuracy of stimulation (based upon real data), training using TMS robots can be reduced to just a single evaluation session rather than an entire training course.

Poster

Wearing Awareness

Designing Wearables for Autonomous Vehicle-Pedestrian Interactions

This project was completed as part of my undergraduate honours thesis. In this project, I employed a series of HCI methodologies such as semi-structured interviews, sketching, and thematic analysis.
The project involved conducting a design study to explore a series of participant-proposed designs for wearable devices that could support communication between autonomous vehicles and pedestrians. Following completion of the design study, a subset of the proposed designs were developed as low-fidelity prototypes.

Extended Abstract Poster Video

LinGrow

Developing a Platform to Support Communication Between Multilingual Families and Educators

This project was completed as part of an extracurricular hackathon, Neuro Nexus. In this project, I worked with an interdisciplinary team of students across Alberta. As the only team member with a background in development, I led a team and mentored my colleagues by teaching them basic programming skills (Thunkable and web development. We developed two minimum viable products (MVP), one web application and one mobile application. Both MVPs contained translation features, a communication portal, and resources and activity information for parents and teachers of multilingual students.

Technical Report

Expressive Clothing: Information Communication Through Clothing

Understanding Methods & Motivations Behind Designing & Creating Expressive Garments

Envisioning Toolkits to Support the Design & Creation of Expressive Garments

This project was started for my Masters thesis. When I transferred to a PhD program, this project became the guiding direction for my Doctoral thesis. I led each milestone of this project, including performing a literature review, designing a study, applying for and receiving ethics approval, conducting the study, performing qualitative data analysis, and writing a paper. Following analysis completion, we also performed a brainstorming session amongst the research team to consider paths forward wherein technology can support the ideation phase of designing expressive garments.

CHI '22 Workshop Poster + Abstract

CHI '24 Full Paper

Example storytelling garments designed by our participants.

Collaborative Assistive Technology Design

Personalizing Glucose Monitors & Understanding When Collaboration Between Involved Stakeholders is Benficial

This project is currently in progress as part of my Doctoral thesis, and is being conducted in collaboration with two researchers from National Research Council (NRC) Canada, one researcher from Autodesk Research, one professor from the University of British Columbia (UBC), and a professor from the University of Victoria. In this project I designed and conducted a three-phase (prototyping, briefing, focus group) co-design study to understand first, what features and customizations people with type 1 diabetes prioritize when designing their own glucose monitors, and second, at what points in the design process collaboration between individuals with diabetes, health care professionals, and product designers is beneficial.

Women in STEM Symposium Poster
ASSETS '22 Workshop Position Paper

Following study completion and a thematic analysis of our collected data, we transitioned into iterative implementation. Informed by our gathered insights and monitor designs, we designed and developed GlucoMaker , a system that supports the collaborative customization of glucose monitors through the introduction of five specific interface components: a customization guidance interface, a device designer interface, a collaborative discussion interace, a learning portal, and a project overview. Using GlucoMaker, we also demonstrated its usability and versatility by designing and fabricating a set of three customized glucose monitors that reflect our participant-proposed designs and/or discussed preferences.