As part of the tradition of earning a PhD, Tyler Fox was “hooded” by his senior supervisor Dr. Gromala at SFU’s Fall Convocation ceremonies in October. PhDs earn the degree and additions to the graduation gear, namely, a long silken hood and a Renaissance-looking cap. Dr. Fox is now on faculty and is the Studio Director for the Interactive Media Design program at the University of Washington.
Xins new paper is about how ideas of Body Image and Body Schema (BIBS) literature may enlarge general Virtual Reality (VR) research and how this motivates our design of VR for chronic pain patients. (space) The researchers focused on their new VR project designed for girls who undergo surgery for Scoliosis, and discussed how BIBS is used in this research more concrete ways. This project is lead by Dr. Diane Gromala and collaborator Dr. Gillian Lauder from BC Childrens and Womens Hospital in Vancouver, Canada. Her new work was built on former graduate student Ozgun Eyluls BIBS research. Tong plans to present this work as an oral presentation on 9 February 2015 at the SPIE conference. SPIE is an international society advancing an interdisciplinary approach to the science and application of light.
Xin Tong successfully defended her M.Sc. thesis defence under supervisor Dr. Diane Gromala at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University in August 2015.Tong’s thesis is titled Encouraging Physical Activity with Gamification Approaches: Goal-setting, Social Community, and “FitPet” Game-based Mobile Application. It focuses on investigating the effectiveness of certain gamification approaches for encouraging physical activity. Tong also developed the mobile interactive game — FitPet. The game associates the players physical activity (steps) to his/her virtual pets health condition and the growth level. She then compared it with two other common gamification strategies in a six-week field study. Results revealed that social interaction was the most effective one under certain condition among all three approaches. Although participants physical activity level in FitPetgroup did not have significant difference compared to the control group, participants liked the game and they gave suggestions to make the game more engaging. In her thesis, Tong also offers design implications for developing future gamification strategies for promoting physical activity, which are summarized from her interviews with the participants. Later, Pain Studies Lab researchers got together to celebrate Tong’s thesis completion.
Left to right:
Ashfaq Amin, Weina Jin, Dimple Gupta, Abhishek Gupta, Mahsoo Salimi
Mine, Servet Ulas, Xin Tong, Dr. Diane Gromala, Dr. Chris Shaw, Gillian Ramsay
Servet Ulaş, digital artist and Weina Jin, digital health professional will join the Pain Studies Lab in Fall, 2015. Servet Ulaş is a Ph.D. graduate student from Istanbul, Turkey. He received his M.A. degree in Visual Communication Design from Sabanci University, under supervision of Dr. Elif Ayiter. He has industry experience as a digital art director in the advertising sector and more recently as an augmented reality creative developer. His research interests are in the areas of interaction design, game design, physical computing and bodily interaction. Weina is currently pursuing M.Sc. under the supervision of Dr.Diane Gromala. She holds a Doctor of Medicine (MD) degree from Peking University. Before joining the Pain Lab, she received two-years’ neurology residency training in Peking University First Hospital. She has also designed physician-patient communication application in a mobile health startup and is the founder of a non-profit medical website. Her research interests are in developing health-related VR, serious game and HCI.
Xin Tong (game designer and developer), together with Amber Choo (game designer and artist), graduate students at Pain Studies Lab, released their App called FitPet designed for providing motivations for more physical activities. The idea is to convert the users health data grabbed by the mobile devices accelerometer (steps) into game coins, where you will need to keep your virtual pet healthy and grow up by feeding food, providing first aid, and play games with your pet. So users need to take care of their pet by taking care of their physical activities. This gamification approach was designed to promote more steps and awareness towards walking in daily routine for users who are lack of motivations and activities.
This is part of Xin Tongs Msc thesis research prototype. She is currently conducting a six-week long-term user study with 23 participants to validate her research proposal and hypothesis. Users need to set their daily activity goals and try to keep their pet in a good condition by completing goals. For more information, please contact Xin at tongxint@sfu.ca. App for iPhone is still under review process but is coming soon. Download the App to your Android phone from here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=xinAmber.FitPet.fitpet
Prof. Gromala, Prof Shaw, and Xin Tong showcased the Pain Studies Labs latest VR project and presented a research paper at this year’s SPIE VR conference in San Francisco. The conference is one of the important Virtual Reality conferences for scientists and artists.
Mobius Floe, a Virtual Reality game designed for pain distraction, was demonstrated in the exhibition session, attracting long lines of participants. In the paper presentation session, Xin presented the collaborative paper about Body Image Body Schema (BIBS) and Virtual Reality. In the paper, Pain Lab researchers Tong, Gromala, Williamson, Shaw and Ischen discussed the relationship between BIBS and VR, and its design implications for VR researchers.
[Paper Published]
Xin Tong, Diane Gromala, Owen Williamson, Chris Shaw, Ozgun Eylul Iscen (2015). Theory Review and Interaction Design Space of Body Image and Body Schema (BIBS) for Embodied Cognition in Virtual Reality,” in IS&T/SPIE Electronic Imaging 2015: The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality. Vol. Number: 9013. Expected Date of Publication: 1 March 2015. (12 pages)
Xin Tong was the recently recipient of the Design Principles and Practices’ Graduate Scholar Award. This award is annually given to outstanding graduate students from around the world. Recipients of this years award are from Brazil, Canada, Columbia, England, Japan and the United States. Graduate Scholars perform a critical role in the annual conference by chairing the parallel sessions and presenting their own research papers.
Xin’s paper, “Experience and Practice: Body Image and Body Schema for Embodied Cognition in Human Computer Interaction Design,” was written in collaboration with her Senior Supervisor, Dr. Diane Gromala. This work combines their experiences with patients in pain clinics and research results from SFU’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology’s Pain Studies Lab.
Dimple Gupta joined Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology as a graduate student in Summer 2014. Dimple is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (in California, United States) and a Registered Social Worker (in British Columbia, Canada), specializing in mental health social services program design and delivery, psychotherapy and health communications. She holds a Masters degree in Social Work from San Jose State University and and brings over 10 years of experience with direct patient care, program implementation, development, compliance, and public relations experience with Silicon Valley health services agencies and the government sector in India. Her research interests include technology in organizational development, human computer interaction, and developing computational technology based treatment interventions to treat chronic pain and mental health world-wide.
Mahsoo Salimi joined Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology as a graduate student in Fall 2014. Mahsoo is an architect and holds a Masters degree in Architecture from University of Colorado. She has worked at Terreform ONE under the supervision of Dr. Mitchel Joachim and Maria Aiolova and she was also a visiting scholar at Prof. Nikolaus Correll Lab at the University of Colorado (Computer Science Department). Her current research interests include Responsive and Interactive Interfaces in Architecture, Biomimetics, Human Computer Interaction, Immersion and Tangible Media, Robotics, Smart Materials and Synthetic Biology.
Dimple Gupta joined Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology as a graduate student in Summer 2014. Dimple is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (in California, United States) and a Registered Social Worker (in British Columbia, Canada), specializing in mental health social services program design and delivery, psychotherapy and health communications. She holds a Masters degree in Social Work from San Jose State University and and brings over 10 years of experience with direct patient care, program implementation, development, compliance, and public relations experience with Silicon Valley health services agencies and the government sector in India. Her research interests include technology in organizational development, human computer interaction, and developing computational technology based treatment interventions to treat chronic pain and mental health world-wide.
Mahsoo Salimi joined Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology as a graduate student in Fall 2014. Mahsoo is an architect and holds a Masters degree in Architecture from University of Colorado. She has worked at Terreform ONE under the supervision of Dr. Mitchel Joachim and Maria Aiolova and she was also a visiting scholar at Prof. Nikolaus Correll Lab at the University of Colorado (Computer Science Department). Her current research interests include Responsive and Interactive Interfaces in Architecture, Biomimetics, Human Computer Interaction, Immersion and Tangible Media, Robotics, Smart Materials and Synthetic Biology.
A new design researcher, Jeewon LEE recently joined the Pain lab. She and Chao Feng worked as a team to prepare SIATs banners at SIGGRAPH 2014. The design team first designed the banners in Illustrator and sent the data to manufacturers for plexiglass engraving and printing on long vinyl banners. The plexiglass sign grabbed people’s attention and invited them to our booth.
