Beth Kolko

Understanding Health in Diverse Communities: The Role of Cooking, Food Choices, and Traditional Recipes

South King County is one of the most diverse regions in the country, but its residents have some of the lowest health outcomes in the county, including high rates of diabetes. Effective interventions for promoting diabetes management or prevention must be culturally appropriate and grounded in understanding what specific challenges these communities face.

This quarter, we will do some readings, identify communities, and go out to the field to investigate attitudes and health behaviors specifically surrounding food. We'll go to the places where people shop and learn how people cook or provide food for their families. We’ll also explore cross-generational and cross-cultural issues related to food.

This work is tied to a larger project in HCDE and CSE that is working to create community-generated videos about healthy behaviors and diabetes management. The work of this research group will be able to inform that larger project.

Students interested in learning more about ethnographic methods and qualitative research are encouraged to join. If you are interested, please send an e-mail to Robert Racadio (racadio@uw.edu) and Beth Kolko (bkolko@uw.edu) with a brief statement describing your interest in the research group and any experience you have in conducting field research. We will meet on Wednesdays from 12:30PM–1:20PM in Sieg 420.

Research group: Designing Technologies for Resource-Constrained Environments

This is a new research group being offered in Winter 2013 on Wednesdays from 4–5:50, leading up to HCDE 419 Concepts in HCI which will be taught by Professor Starbird in Spring 2013. The winter quarter research group will be led by a team including HCDE faculty Kate Starbird and Beth Kolko and CSE faculty Gaetano Borriello and Ruth Anderson. [This is a slightly different form for the HCDE-CSE collaboration around 419 and CSE capstone that has been running for several years.]

In this Winter Directed Research group, HCDE and CSE students will meet together to develop project ideas for technologies specifically designed to meet social impact needs, such as addressing the needs of low resource communities (in the Seattle area and internationally) or designing for disaster and/or humanitarian response. Activities will focus on project scoping, performing user research, and assessing the technology landscape (mobile phones, tablets, embedded sensors, cloud services, SMS, etc.).

****If you'd like more details, we'll be holding an information session at 5pm on Thursday Nov 8th in CSE 303. We'll be outlining some initial ideas for this year's projects.**

In Spring quarter, the projects begun in the research group will form the basis of HCDE 419 which is a 5-credit class that will be paired with the 5-credit CSE481K capstone project course The Spring course is for HCDE students to take the ideas developed in Winter and work with CSE students to actually realize a working prototype and complete preliminary evaluations. HCDE 419 is a more traditional course with HCI-focused readings and assignments, and also project-based milestones, demos, and some presentations. We work hard to ensure that projects get connected to real customers who can provide feedback to the development team. The intent is that groups of CSE and HCDE students formed in Winter quarter will continue on to work together in Spring quarter (although there is always some shuffling in that not all students continue on in Spring quarter and some students will enroll in 419 who won't have been in the Winter research group.)

The primary audience for the group is undergraduates, although interested graduate students are welcome to attend.

** If you intend to take HCDE 419 in Spring 2013, we encourage you to sign up for this 2-credit research group that will meet Wednesdays from 4-5:50. **

Projects that have come out of similar collaborations include: low-cost milk banking for HIV positive mothers, low-cost ultrasound, converting paper records to digital form, visualizing vaccine cold-chain inventories, and creating health videos for south Seattle immigrant communities. If you have any questions, please contact Kate at kstarbi@uw.edu or Beth at bkolko@uw.edu.

More information about research in this area on campus can be found at: http://mwt.cs.washington.edu/ and change.washington.edu.We've done this for the past five years and it has been very successful. Each year, we have had projects that have gone all the way to real deployments and publications in research workshops or conferences.

Here are a few sample projects:

  • StarBus: SMS based vehicle tracking targeting public transportation in Kyrgyzstan. R. Anderson, A. Poon, C. Lustig, W. Brunette, G. Borriello, B. Kolko. Building a Transportation Information System using only GPS and Basic SMS Infrastructure, ICTD 2009.
  • Multilearn: Multi-input device educational games for elementary education in India. C. Tseng, S. Garg, H. Underwood, L. Findlater, R. Anderson, J. Pal. Examining emergent dominance patterns in multiple input based educational systems, IDID 2010.
  • Midwives' ultrasound. Developed an interface for antenatal ultrasound for use by rural midwives in Uganda. W. Brunette, W. Gerard, M. Hicks, A. Hope, M. Ishimitsu, P. Prasad, R. Anderson, G. Borriello, B., Kolko, R. Nathan. Portable Antenatal Ultrasound Platform for Village Midwives, ACM DEV 2010.
  • Milkbank: Developed low-cost milk banking for HIV positive mothers. R. Chaudhri, D. Vlachos, J. Kaza, J. Palludan, N. Bilbao, T. Martin, G. Borriello, B. Kolko, K. Israel-Ballard. 2011. A system for safe flash-heat pasteurization of human breast milk, NSDR 2011.
  • Low-power Sensors and Smartphones for Tracking Water Collection in Rural Ethiopia. R. Chaudhri, R. Sodt, K. Lieberg, J. Chilton, G. Borriello, J. Cook, Y. Masuda. IEEE Pervasive Computing (special issue on Pervasive Information and Communication Technologies for Development – ICT4D), Vol. 11, No. 3, July-September 2012.
  • Digitizing Paper Forms with Mobile Imaging Technologies. N. Dell, N. Breit, T. Chaluco, J. Crawford, G. Borriello. ACM 2nd Annual Symposium on Computing for Development (DEV), Atlanta, Georgia, March 2012.