Research Assignment #2

The purpose of this assignment is to have you continue to think critically and creatively about how to measure health motivation and perception, and how you might apply new technologies and microinteraction to improve such measures.

• Read the surveys provided by Stephen (obtained from an expert in health behavior theory).
• From them, pick a health-related behavior or state that you think is important to measure longitudinally in the field, either to improve health research or to create more effective health interventions. This should not be a behavior you have picked for any prior assignment.
• Conduct a thorough literature search on the measurement of this behavior or state. Do not assume that the measure provided to you is the "best" measure. Instead, look around and see what you find that researchers are using. You will look for two types of instruments:
  • "Traditional" instruments. These are likely to be paper-based instruments. Search for research articles in the medical or psychology literature (see Pubmed or PsychInfo databases) where people have needed to the measure the behavior, and then figure out how researchers have done so by finding the citations to the instruments used. Then find the papers that describe the instruments themselves. Gather as much information you can about each instruments, including the one you started with. Sometimes you may have to contact the authors of papers to figure out what the actual questions are on a survey. You are likely to find that there is no single instrument for a particular behavior, but rather many that might be used. Try to determine which are most commonly accepted in recent research articles and why. By tracing back in time (and reading key papers), trace the historical development of the measures.
  • "Emerging" instruments. These are new instruments that are likely to use new technologies to measure the behavior. Search for research articles in the medical or psychology literature, but also the engineering and computer science literature (e.g., IEEE, ACM Digital Library, and Springer databases). Find examples of new ways of measuring the behavior.
• Make a list of all the research articles you have found and put the articles into the class Mendeley library with appropriate keywords (including one keyword, which is your name). For each article, provide all the reference information for the paper (title, author, journal, pages, etc.) and, if it is available online, a link to the article in the class Dropbox. For articles not available online, provide a hardcopy if possible. Whenever possible, find the actual questions used in the paper surveys. In 1-3 paragraphs for each article's entry in Mendeley, explain why you think the article is important for someone trying to understand the behavior you have selected and the history of how that behavior has been measured, or how the behavior may be measured in the future.
• You will turn in a document (writing as scientifically as you can and backing up your statements with citations from both the readings so far and papers you find on your own) containing the following:
  1. Your name, email, department, and year in school.
  2. A few sentences on why it is important to measure the behavior/state you picked and why you picked that behavior/state.
  3. What is easy and what is difficult about measuring the behavior
  4. A summary of the historical "genealogy" of the measurement (1-2 pages).
  5. A description of how advanced technology could be used to improve the measurement (1-2 pages).
  6. A plan for using the Pebble and/or (1) microEMA, (2) NFC tapping, (3) sensing, and (4) Google Glass to improve the measurement; provide as detailed a design as you can, and backup your design choices as best as you can (1-2 pages).
  7. Your annotated bibliography via Mendeley (no more than two pages)

Send an email of the assignment to ...@neu.edu. Name the file in this format: [your last name].research2.pdf.