Megan Hofmann wins SIGCHI award for disability-device dissertation

Branching into a brand-new area of study is perilous for young PhD students, but Megan Hofmann was confident she was on to something with huge potential impact, if only she could produce the research to prove it.

“There is a little bit of fear when you’re going in,” Hofmann said. “You know you are doing work that is important for you and that you believe in, but you don’t know if anyone else is going to follow in your footsteps.”

Hofmann, a senior research fellow at Khoury College who will begin as an assistant professor this fall, has seen that self-belief and dedication pay off. Her doctoral dissertation at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science has earned recognition from peers within the fields of human–computer interaction (HCI) and digital fabrication, and on February 14, she was announced as a recipient of the SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award. The award committee touted her research as “seminal” in the field of medical making because of its potential for widespread social impact and practical application.

Hofmann manages her own disability and chronic pain, and her research focuses on creating customized assistive devices. Such devices are invaluable for people with disabilities looking to perform everyday tasks, especially because each person has different needs that often aren’t properly addressed by one-size-fits-all solutions. But the devices are often inaccessible for people with disabilities and their clinicians, particularly for those without computing backgrounds.

Despite the need, little research has been conducted in the field due to the barriers of digital fabrication, which is the use of computing and digital modeling to build physical objects. Additionally, there’s a lack of representation for people with disabilities in computer science, which often leads to oversights and gaps in technologies that would serve them. But when she began her doctoral dissertation, Hofmann sought to change that. She began building technologies that would allow people to design and 3D print medical support devices tailored to their needs — even if they lacked programming experience or technical expertise.

“I really wanted to think about how people who came from my background as someone with a disability — or how people like my own clinicians — could access new technology instead of just supporting the engineers that I surrounded myself with during the research,” Hofmann said. “I saw that need in my own life. I saw that need in people around me, and it wasn’t being explored in the wider field. So I really wanted to build that new space.”

Hofmann’s research process and initial ideas were broadly motivated by programming language concepts, as she aimed to create modular, parameterizable components that others could reuse. She applied these concepts to 3D printing, and later introduced machine knitting to the medical making space, using the innovative printing technology to produce medical devices for the first time.

According to Hofmann, most HCI dissertations center on human behavior or complex systems. But what set her thesis apart was how she combined the two — conducting multiple six-month ethnography studies with clinicians, gaining insight into the medical making aspect of the research, then tying her findings back to the optimization and systems components of her work.

“What gave us the technology side of it is that I observed patterns in how people go about building optimizers, 3D models, knitting patterns that no one had seen before,” Hofmann said. “We didn’t invent new algorithms or methods, but we restructured them in a way that people who are not computer scientists, who are not engineers, could understand these systems and use them without the support of others.”

Though the technology is still in its infancy, it has already been applied successfully. Hofmann cites an occupational therapy patient in Pittsburgh who loved cooking, and who wanted to cut vegetables and prepare food independently. But he was paraplegic, with no motion in his lower body and limited mobility in his hand, which made it difficult for him to safely grip the knife.

“We designed a special case that covered his knife handles,” Hofmann said. “So he took a standard kitchen knife, and we stuck it into this case that had a handle for him to put his hand through. That way he could hold on to it, rock his hand back and forth, and cut independently.”

Though it may seem like a small achievement, the device had to be designed extremely specifically and carefully to fit the patient’s hand measurements and motion needs.

“We saw someone take this assistive technology that we helped them make and worked with them on, then bring it home and get a lot of joy out of it. That was some of the earlier work that I did on this thesis, and it propelled me forward for years,” Hofmann said.

Hofmann’s aspirations for the research and functionally of the software stretches much further than its present capabilities. In the knife example, the project still required a full team of engineers and medical makers to see the process through. With further advancements, Hofmann envisions a beginning-to-end process where people without computing skills could customize assistive devices for themselves, by themselves.

“In the current state of this research, it enables new people to collaborate with programmers,” Hofmann said. “But the long-term goal is to make it so that people don’t need to be programmers in the sense that we think of them now.”

Though it was self-belief that first got Hofmann’s research off the ground, seeing her work praised now by peers only further drives her.

“Having this acknowledged by the awards committee, having it seen as top-tier research not just in my little sub-area but across the entire field of HCI, was really supportive to the work,” Hofmann said. “It definitely motivates me that I’m going in the right direction here at Northeastern.”

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