Equity-Driven Sensing System for Measuring Skin Tone–Calibrated Peripheral Blood Oxygen Saturation (OptoBeat): Development, Design, and Evaluation Study

JMIR Biomedical Engineering · 2022 · 8 citations

• Computer Science
• Computer Science
• Medicine

BACKGROUND: within 1% of the ground truth in levels as low as 75%. OBJECTIVE: can be measured with a smartphone camera using the screen as a light source (hypothesis 3). METHODS: for measurement, we reoxygenated sheep blood and pumped it through synthetic arteries. A custom optical system was connected from the smartphone screen (flashing red and blue) to the analyte and into the phone's camera for measurement. RESULTS: measurements were accurate to within 0.5% of the ground truth, and pulse rate measurements were accurate to within 1.7% of the ground truth. CONCLUSIONS: as low as 75%, and normalize to avoid skin tone-based bias.

Affective Touch as Immediate and Passive Wearable Intervention

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies · 2022 · 30 citations

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Computer Science

We investigated affective touch as a new pathway to passively mitigate in-the-moment anxiety. While existing mobile interventions offer great promises for health and well-being, they typically focus on achieving long-term effects such as shifting behaviors. As such, most mobile interventions are not applicable to provide immediate help in acute conditions -- when a user experiences a high anxiety level during ongoing events (e.g., completing high-stake tasks or mitigating interpersonal conflicts). A few works have developed passive interventions that are effective in-the-moment by leveraging breathing regulations and biofeedback. In this paper, we drew on neuroscientific findings on affective touch, the slow stroking on hairy skin that can elicit innate pleasantness and evaluated affective touch as a mobile health intervention. To induce affective touch, we first engineered a wearable device that renders a soft stroking sensation on the user's forearm. Then, we conducted a between-group experiment, in which participants underwent high-stress situations with/without receiving affective touch and post-experiment interviews, with 24 participants. Our results showed that participants who received affective touch experienced lower state anxiety and the same physiological stress response level compared to the control group participants. We also found that affective touch facilitated emotion regulation by rendering pleasantness, providing emotional support, and shifting attention. Finally, we discussed the immediate effect of affective touch on anxiety and physiological stress, the benefits of affective touch as a passive intervention, and the implementation considerations to use affective touch in just-in-time systems.

PuffPacket: A Platform for Unobtrusively Tracking the Fine-grained Consumption Patterns of E-cigarette Users

2020 · 9 citations

• Computer Science
• Computer Science
• Computer Security

The proliferation of e-cigarettes and portable vaporizers presents new opportunities for accurately and unobtrusively tracking e-cigarette use. PuffPacket is a hardware and soft-ware research platform that leverages the technology built into vaporizers, e-cigarettes and other electronic drug delivery devices to ubiquitously track their usage. The system piggybacks on the signals these devices use to directly measure and track the nicotine consumed by users. PuffPacket augments e-cigarettes with Bluetooth to calculate the frequency, intensity, and duration of each inhalation. This information is augmented with smartphone-based location and activity information to help identify potential contextual triggers. Puff-Packet is generalizable to a wide variety of electronic nicotine,THC, and other drug delivery devices currently on the mar-ket. The hardware and software for PuffPacket is open-source so it can be expanded upon and leveraged for mobile health tracking research.