Current research

 Applications of Ergonomics (Medical)

Clinicians need access to high-quality evidence for clinical decision making. Questions frequently arise during patient care but these information needs aren't being met and clinicians are limited by their inability to afford more than a few seconds per patient for finding and assimilating evidence. The consequence of these challenges is that high-quality evidence is inconsistently translated into practice. We propose to fill the gap between the knowledge needs of the clinicians and the best evidence available in the clinical literature. To achieve this we will provide wireless mobile computers that are packaged with appropriate evidence resources to family physicians and general internists in order to determine if these devices can improve patient care and prescribing practices both in the clinics and at the bedside. Before we complete a randomised study to evaluate the impact of this intervention on patient care and medical errors, we need to assess the information needs at the point of care of hospital and community-based clinicians, and to develop and evaluate formats for delivering this information on mobile computers

Projects: Online Assessment of Quality of Life for Prostate Cancer Patients   Presenting Clinical Evidence to the Point of Care  
People:     Harumi Takeshita   Holly Witteman   Natasha Martin   Danielle Lottridge   Eric Tursman   Anna Malandrino   Sharon Straus   Mark Chignell   Romana Danicic   Andre Kushniruk   Jin Li   Aleksandra (Sasha) Jovicic   Annie Xu   Danielle Lottridge   Beth Vary   Kate Sellen  

 Personalization

Individual differences are rarely accounted for in the design of information technology devices and applications. The goal of this project is to make information technology fit the user. This goal will be achieved by examining how individuals differ in terms of the way in which they prefer to acquire information and use websites. Two typing instruments, the Communication Preferences Inventory (CPI) and the Technology Profile Inventory (TPI) are currently in development in an effort to understand how the individual differences of users. It is hoped that sound design principles for web site construction will be developed based on user type and a better understanding of the online behaviours of each user type.

Projects: Communication Preferences (CPI)   Cognitive Abilities in HCI   Privacy (PAQ)   User-Centred Design of Wireless Multimedia Applications  
People:     Jacek Gwizdka   Anna Malandrino   Leonardo Ruppenthal   Heather Parker   Mark Chignell   Danielle Lottridge   Alvin Chin  

 Ubiquitous Computing

Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people. Ubiquitous computing is a very difficult integration of human factors, computer science, engineering, and social sciences. This has required new work in operating systems, user interfaces, networks, wireless, displays, and many other areas.

Projects: Wearable Computing in High Stress Situations   Voice Portals  
People:     Calum Tsang   John Chattoe   Mark Chignell   Vladimir Morozow   Stephen Boyne   Sachi Mizobuchi   Nippon Charoenkitkarn   David Modjeska   X. Zhang   J.G. Peterson   Natalia Modjeska   Nada Jovan Pavlovic   Sacha Chua  

 Spatialized Voice Collaboration

We propose a method for improved audioconferencing using spatialized audio. This method addresses a number of problems in audioconferencing, such as: allowing more than one person in an audioconference to speak at once without bringing the audioconference to a halt; simplifying the identification of speakers; increasing the intelligibility of speech and reducing the deleterious effects of background noise). Our work utilizes the concept of a Personal Audio Operating System (PAOS) that consists of the personal audio space that each person with hearing perceives (e.g., noises, voices, music, non-speech audio, etc. The current software can be downloaded from http://www.vocalvillage.net/

Projects: Voice Collaboration   Architecting Voice Portal   Memories of Synchronicity   Innovative Voice Over IP Soft Phones: A Field Trial and Evaluation   OKI - Research on design and evluation of flexible audio spaces for a geographically dispersed work group  
People:     Anna Malandrino   Mark Chignell   Ryan Kilgore   Savio Rodrigues   Shengdong Zhao   Melanie Baran   Rick Bodner   Paul Smith   Annie Xu   Jamy Li  

Past Research

 Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management

Projects: {project_for_ra_2.name} 

 Hypertext

The lab has been involved in hypertext research for a number of years. Areas of particular interest include models of information exploration, developed in collaboration with John Waterworth, formerly of the Institute of Systems Science in Singapore and now at the University of Umeå. Work has also been done on developing information exploration systems that integrate query and browsing, beginning with the thesis by Golovchinsky and also described in papers at INTERCHI '93 and Hypertext '93. This work was funded by ITRC in a project headed by Professor Frank Tompa of the University of Waterloo. We have also applied the same interface technology to a web browser based on Mosaic. This work is part of our MultiSurf project that explores navigation aides for browsing the World Wide Web. A brief summary is available. Research has also been done on recognizing landmarks in hypermedia (Valdez, Chignell, and Glenn, 1988) and on mental models of hypermedia (Teshiba and Chignell, 1988). In his Ph.D research, summarized in Valdez and Chignell (1992), Felix Valdez demonstrated that nonlinear and linear navigation occurs in both printed text and hypertext in roughly the same proportions (60/40 in favour of linear navigation). This finding provides the motivation for our recent emphasis on the development of information exploration systems that combine linear and non-linear navigation. Other research has looked at the relationship between authors and readers in hypertext. Brown developed the Anchors Aweigh system which was used in experiments that compared the types of links created by authors with the types of links actually read by readers (Baron, Brown, and Chignell, 1994). The results showed that there are strong individual differences in link usage: some people strongly prefer to use semantic links, while others strongly prefer rhetorical links.

Projects: {project_for_ra_5.name}