Julie A. Kientz

Julie A. Kientz
University of Washington Seattle | UW · Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering

Ph.D.

About

177
Publications
70,038
Reads
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8,820
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
September 2008 - present
University of Washington Seattle
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)

Publications

Publications (177)
Article
Enabling opportunities for young children with disabilities to co-engage in learning activities alongside their non-disabled peers is essential for promoting equity in early childhood education. We investigate how collaborative technology can be designed to support young neurodivergent and neurotypical children in playing together. By integrating t...
Article
The Interactions website (interactions.acm.org) hosts a stable of bloggers who share insights and observations on HCI, often challenging current practices. Each issue we'll publish selected posts from some of the leading and emerging voices in the field.
Article
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Background Following increases in smartphone access, more parents seek parenting advice through internet sources, including blogs, web-based forums, or mobile apps. However, identifying quality apps (ones that respond to the diverse experiences of families) for guidance on child development can be challenging. Objective This review of mobile healt...
Preprint
UNSTRUCTURED Following increases in smartphone access, more parents seek out parenting advice through internet sources, including blogs, online forums, or mobile applications (apps). However, searching and filtering through apps in the app store can be challenging due to lack of regulation in the quality of available mobile apps, especially among a...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Recent increases in smartphone ownership among underserved populations have inspired researchers in medicine, computing, and health informatics to design and evaluate mobile health (mHealth) interventions, specifically for those supporting child development and growth. While these interventions demonstrate possible effectiveness at large...
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Full-text available
Background Recent increases in smartphone ownership among underserved populations have inspired researchers in medicine, computing, and health informatics to design and evaluate mobile health (mHealth) interventions, specifically for those supporting child development and growth. Although these interventions demonstrate possible effectiveness at la...
Article
Adolescent depression is common; however, over 60% of depressed adolescents do not receive mental health care. Digitally-delivered evidence-based psychosocial interventions (EBPIs) may provide an opportunity to improve access and engagement in mental health care. We present a case study that reviews lessons learned from using the Discover - Design...
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Background Developers, designers, and researchers use rapid prototyping methods to project the adoption and acceptability of their health intervention technology (HIT) before the technology becomes mature enough to be deployed. Although these methods are useful for gathering feedback that advances the development of HITs, they rarely provide usable...
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Background: The school-age years, approximately ages seven through eleven, represent a natural transition when children begin assuming some responsibility for their asthma management. Previously, we designed a theoretically derived, tailored parent-child shared asthma management mHealth application (app) prototype, Improving Asthma Care Together (I...
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Introduction Asthma is an incurable, lifelong condition that places children at increased risk for exacerbation, hospitalization and school absences. Most pediatric asthma interventions target parents alone and are overly prescriptive. Improving Asthma Care Together (IMPACT) is a novel shared management system comprised of a mobile health (mHealth)...
Article
Players envision how the future design of location-based games can support exploration, socializing, and improving physical and mental health in the post-pandemic new normal.
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The COVID-19 pandemic upended the lives of families with young children as school closures and social distancing requirements left caregivers struggling to facilitate educational experiences, maintain social connections, and ensure financial stability. Considering families' increased reliance on technology to survive, this research documents parent...
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Co-design methods have involved older adults in the design process to fill the knowledge gap that younger adult designers might encounter when designing for an aging population. A focus of co-design means establishing equal and equitable relationships between users and designers. To understand the factors that contribute to equal collaborations bet...
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Background Many teenagers in the United States experience challenges with symptoms of depression, and they lack adequate resources for accessing in-person mental health care. Involving teens and clinicians in designing technologies that use evidence-based practices that reduce barriers to accessing mental health care is crucial. Interventions based...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Developers, designers, and researchers use rapid prototyping methods to project the adoption and acceptability of their health intervention technology (HIT) before the technology becomes mature enough to be deployed. Although these methods are useful for gathering feedback that advances the development of HITs, they rarely provide usable...
Article
Human-computer interaction has a long history of working with marginalized people. We sought to understand how HCI researchers navigate work that engages with marginalized people and considerations researchers might work through to expand benefits and mitigate potential harms. In total, 24 HCI researchers, located primarily in the United States, pa...
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Many stakeholders can be involved in supporting a child's development, including parents, pediatricians, and educators. These stakeholders struggle to collaborate, and experts suggest that health information technology could improve their communication. Trust, based on perceptions of competence, benevolence, and integrity is fundamental to supporti...
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Advancements in evidence-based psychosocial interventions, digital technologies, and implementation strategies (i.e., health services research products) for youth mental health services have yet to yield significant improvement in public health outcomes. Achieving such impact will require that these research products are easy to use, useful, and co...
Preprint
BACKGROUND Many teenagers in the United States experience challenges with symptoms of depression, and they lack adequate resources for accessing in-person mental health care. Involving teens and clinicians in designing technologies that use evidence-based practices that reduce barriers to accessing mental health care is crucial. Interventions based...
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Full-text available
Parents and their school-age children can impact one another's sleep. Most sleep-tracking tools, however, are designed for adults and make it difficult for parents and children to track together. To examine how to design a family-centered sleep tracking tool, we designed DreamCatcher. DreamCatcher is an in-home, interactive, shared display that agg...
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N-of-1 tools offer the potential to support people in monitoring health and identifying individualized health management strategies. We argue that elicitation of individualized goals and customization of tracking to support those goals are a critical yet under-studied and under-supported aspect of self-tracking. We review examples of self-tracking...
Article
Users of voice assistants often report that they fall into patterns of using their device for a limited set of interactions, like checking the weather and setting alarms. However, it's not clear if limited use is, in part, due to lack of learning about the device's functionality. We recruited 10 diverse families to participate in a one-month deploy...
Article
Human-centered design (HCD) can be used to communicate research study findings to designers of health information technologies (HIT). We used the HCD approach to develop personas, scenarios, and design guidelines for designers with the aim that it would lead to new HIT designs that support the autonomy and health of older adults. The foundation of...
Chapter
In this chapter, we discuss robotics and the use of socially assistive robots (SAR) for autism. While virtual agents and animated toys are sometimes considered robots, this chapter focuses on physical instantiations (both anthropomorphic and humanoid) capable of carrying out behaviorally or socially contingent actions (both autonomously and operate...
Chapter
In this chapter, we describe what has come to be termed “natural user interfaces” (NUIs) and review how they have been used with individuals on the autism spectrum. Although the word natural can be hotly contested given that most movements are not actually “natural” but learned, we use the standard phrasing of natural user interfaces in this scope...
Chapter
Autism is a complicated diagnosis, label, identity, and concept. Conceived as an umbrella of disabilities by clinicians, autistic experiences as described by those who live them are as vast and varied as any. Autism diagnoses are highly prevalent, engendering interest from autistic people and a vast array of professional caregivers, researchers, ed...
Chapter
Use of technologies in support of autism began with the advent of the desktop computer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The expansion of internet technologies in the last two decades has broadened this scope as well, but we here include those systems with a traditional “desktop” model to them even if people are now accessing them on a wide variet...
Chapter
In this chapter, we provide a description of the methods we used to identify and classify interactive technology research included in this review. Through a high-level analysis of the existing literature, we developed a classification scheme to help categorize each technology approach. Several frameworks could be developed around the same body of l...
Chapter
In this chapter, we describe a brief overview of work involving virtual (VR), augmented (AR), and mixed (MR) reality with autistic people. For the purposes of this work and using our technology platform classification scheme, this chapter includes only VR, AR, and MR applications, eventually focusing on those that use head-mounted displays, often c...
Chapter
In this chapter, we discuss shared, interactive surfaces and their use in relation to autism. Shared interactive surfaces include applications that are intended for multiple users in a co-located, mostly synchronous, interaction, such as large displays, tabletop computers, electronic whiteboards, etc. However, with the popularity of larger touchscr...
Chapter
In this chapter, we describe sensor-based and wearable technologies that have been used in relation to autism. Based on our classification scheme’s definition, sensor-based and wearable technologies include the use of sensors (e.g., cameras, microphones, peripheral physiological, and accelerometers), both in the environment and on the body, or comp...
Chapter
In this chapter, we overview the applications designed and developed for mobile devices to empower autistic people to learn new skills and conduct a variety of tasks (King et al., 2014). Although the lines between types and sizes of devices are continually being blurred, in this chapter we distinguish mobile devices from those primarily considered...
Conference Paper
Teenagers have unique needs for mental wellbeing that can be supported by interactive technologies. Teens also have valuable input in the design of technology, so designers and researchers must seek new methods for involving them in the design process. We enrolled 23 unacquainted teenagers in an Asynchronous Remote Communities (ARC) study consistin...
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Background: As people increasingly receive personal health information through technology, there is increased importance for this information to be communicated with empathy and consideration for the patient's experience of consuming it. Although technology enables people to have more frequent and faster access to their health information, it coul...
Article
The era of big data is well upon us, and understandably, there is much excitement over what we can learn from so much data and new big data analyses. However, big data often comes with big challenges, such as issues around data privacy and retention and resource constraints like battery life and storage. Moreover, big data may often not actually be...
Conference Paper
Raiding is a format in digital gaming that requires groups of people to collaborate and/or compete for a common goal. In 2017, the raiding format was introduced in the location-based mobile game Pokémon GO, which offers a mixed reality experience to friends and strangers coordinating for in-person raids. To understand this technology-mediated socia...
Conference Paper
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We investigate how families repair communication breakdowns with digital home assistants. We recruited 10 diverse families to use an Amazon Echo Dot in their homes for four weeks. All families had at least one child between four and 17 years old. Each family participated in pre- and post- deployment interviews. Their interactions with the Echo Dot...
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The rise of affordable sensors and apps has enabled people to monitor various health indicators via self-tracking. This trend encourages self-experimentation, a subset of self-tracking in which a person systematically explores potential causal relationships to try to answer questions about their health. Although recent research has investigated how...
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Despite public health efforts, individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) still have very high rates of tobacco smoking. Innovative approaches to reach this population are needed. These series of case studies aimed to descriptively evaluate the usability, user experience (UX), and user engagement (UE) of Learn to Quit (LTQ), an acceptance and co...
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Health information technology (HIT) could aid collaboration in the complex, interprofessional space of child development. Trust between stakeholders is necessary to support collaboration, but extant research provides little guidance on designing HIT that promotes trust within interprofessional collaborations. We analyzed interview data obtained fro...
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Objective: Health information technology could provide valuable support for inter-professional collaboration to address complex health issues, but current HIT systems do not adequately support such collaboration. Existing theoretical research on supporting collaborative work can help inform the design of collaborative HIT systems. Using the exampl...
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In this study, we present Coco's Videos, a video-viewing platform for preschoolers designed to support them in learning to self-manage their media consumption. We report results from a three-week experimental deployment in 24 homes in which preschoolers used three different versions of the platform: one that is neutral to the limits they set, one t...
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Play is an enjoyable and developmentally useful part of early childhood, and parent-child play is a highly productive mechanism by which children learn to participate in the world. We conducted an observational lab study to examine how 15 parent-child pairs (children age 4-6) respond to and play with tablet apps as compared to analog toys. We found...
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Prior research indicates that many people wish to limit aspects of their smartphone use. Why is it that certain smartphone use feels so meaningless? We examined this question by using interviews, the experience sampling method, and mobile logging of 86,402 sessions of app use. One motivation for use (habitual use to pass the time) and two types of...
Article
When evaluating the design of a mobile app, many designers focus on a number of varying metrics related to the user experience, namely its usability, look and feel, usefulness, and overall delight that users experience when using it. However, even the most usable, beautiful, and delightful application can have an impact on its user in a negative wa...
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Background: Smoking rates in the United States have been reduced in the past decades to 15% of the general population. However, up to 88% of people with psychiatric symptoms still smoke, leading to high rates of disease and mortality. Therefore, there is a great need to develop smoking cessation interventions that have adequate levels of usability...
Article
Most health technologies are designed to support people who have already decided to work toward better health. Thus, there remains an opportunity to design technologies to help motivate people who have not yet decided to make a change. Understanding the experiences of people who have already started to make a health behavior change and how they mad...
Conference Paper
Music is intrinsically linked to our social lives. As more music becomes available through streaming services, deciding what music is appropriate for social events becomes increasingly challenging and nuanced. While prior work has considered the social role of music and the creation of music playlists for user contexts, how individuals utilize musi...
Article
In this work, we sought to understand the experiences and disability disclosure preferences of adults with and without disabilities who have dated online. Our 91 survey respondents expressed varying opinions about the need for potential partners to disclose disability status when online dating depending on the nature or perceived severity, with "vi...
Article
Many people who want to build mobile applications based on sensing systems have to decide what type of sensing approaches to use, often trading off factors like accuracy, time, and battery life. If you're building an app that uses location, motion data, or inferred data about usage, there will necessarily be inaccuracy in the output of those system...
Conference Paper
In this one-day workshop, we aim to bring together a community of researchers at the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) conference who will share how they already make or plan to make equity-promoting fairness by allocating more resources and opportunities to those who need it? and inclusivity? the inclusion and meaningful participation of peopl...
Conference Paper
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We consider why and how women track their menstrual cycles, examining their experiences to uncover design opportunities and extend the field's understanding of personal informatics tools. To understand menstrual cycle tracking practices, we collected and analyzed data from three sources: 2,000 reviews of popular menstrual tracking apps, a survey of...
Conference Paper
Diagnostic self-tracking, the recording of personal information to diagnose or manage a health condition, is a common practice, especially for people with chronic conditions. Unfortunately, many who attempt diagnostic self-tracking have trouble accomplishing their goals. People often lack knowledge and skills needed to design and conduct scientific...
Conference Paper
Many health care providers, with a variety of trainings, counsel clients on quitting smoking on a day-today basis. In their clinical practice, they draw from and adapt guidelines and research-based strategies to fit individual client situations and challenges. Designers of technologies to support quitting smoking can learn from these real world pra...
Conference Paper
Health Information Technology (HIT) has enormous potential to transform healthcare, and optimal design and implementation of HIT has to incorporate diverse fields' perspectives, including medicine, engineering, design, anthropology, and other related disciplinary areas. WISH workshop at CHI 2017 is designed to bring together researchers and practit...
Conference Paper
The Workshop on Interactive Systems in Healthcare (WISH) brings together industry and academic researchers in human-computer interaction, biomedical informatics, and other disciplines to develop a cross-disciplinary research agenda that will drive future innovations. In addition, the workshop facilitates a common, safe space to share and discuss me...
Conference Paper
Sleep is an important aspect of our health, but it is difficult for people to track manually because it is an unconscious activity. The ability to sense sleep has aimed to lower the barriers of tracking sleep. Although sleep sensors are widely available, their usefulness and potential to promote healthy sleep behaviors has not been fully realized....
Conference Paper
Though prior work shows parents worry about screen media experiences displacing physical activity and time outdoors, this research does not account for location-based mobile games like Pokémon GO, which specifically facilitate outdoor activity. To fill this gap in the research, we surveyed and interviewed parents to understand (1) their values and...
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People who are blind or low vision may have a harder time participating in exercise due to inaccessibility or lack of encouragement. To address this, we developed Eyes-Free Yoga using the Microsoft Kinect that acts as a yoga instructor and has personalized auditory feedback based on skeletal tracking. We conducted two different studies on two diffe...
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Many stakeholders with different social and professional backgrounds can be involved in supporting a child's development. Experts note the importance of collaboration between all of these stakeholders in order to adequately support a child. Electronic systems have the potential to facilitate collaboration, and experts have suggested that models and...
Article
To help reach populations of children without consistent Internet access or medical care, we designed and implemented Baby Steps Text, an automated text message-based screening tool. We conducted preliminary user research via storyboarding and prototyping with target populations and then developed a fully functional system. In a one-month deploymen...