James Fogarty’s research while affiliated with University of Mary Washington and other places

Menopause is often overlooked or medicalized, consequently devaluing individual experiences and failing to support individuals experiencing this life event. Family dynamics, death, and taboo further mean that individuals often miss out on information that could help them contextualize their experiences. We examine participant experiences with menopause and explore designs of digital and non-digital legacies for sharing menopause experiences across generations. We conducted semi-structured interviews and design sessions with 17 participants who experienced or are experiencing menopause. We report participant information needs and sense-making practices, including what personalized information participants wish to pass down and preferred formats for intergenerational sharing. Findings highlight the potential of using storytelling and life-logging to create 'holistic' memories of the menopause journey, to support self-reflection, and for using legacies to initiate conversations about marginalized health experiences. We identify future design and research opportunities for the HCI and CSCW communities to support intergenerational sharing of non-medicalized and stigmatized health experiences.

Despite significant progress in the capabilities of mobile devices and applications, most apps remain oblivious to their users' abilities. To enable apps to respond to users' situated abilities, we created the Ability-Based Design Mobile Toolkit (ABD-MT). ABD-MT integrates with an app's user input and sensors to observe a user's touches, gestures, physical activities, and attention at runtime, to measure and model these abilities, and to adapt interfaces accordingly. Conceptually, ABD-MT enables developers to engage with a user's "ability profile,'' which is built up over time and inspectable through our API. As validation, we created example apps to demonstrate ABD-MT, enabling ability-aware functionality in 91.5% fewer lines of code compared to not using our toolkit. Further, in a study with 11 Android developers, we showed that ABD-MT is easy to learn and use, is welcomed for future use, and is applicable to a variety of end-user scenarios.

BACKGROUND Mobile health (mHealth) tools have potential to reduce the burden of chronic conditions that disproportionately affect Hispanic and Latinx communities, but digital divides in the access and use of health technology suggest that mHealth has the potential to exacerbate—rather than reduce—these disparities. OBJECTIVE A key step toward developing health technology that is accessible and usable is to understand community member perspectives and needs so that technology is culturally relevant and appropriately contextualized. In this study, we aimed to examine perspectives of Hispanic and Latinx community members in Washington State about mHealth. METHODS We recruited English- and Spanish-speaking Hispanic or Latinx adults to participate in virtual focus groups through existing community-based networks across rural and urban regions of Washington State. Focus groups included a presentation of narrative slideshow materials developed by the research team depicting mHealth use case examples of asthma in children and fall risk in older adults. Focus group questions asked participants to respond to the case examples and to further explore mHealth use preferences, benefits, barriers, and concerns. Focus group recordings were professionally transcribed and Spanish transcripts translated into English. We developed a qualitative codebook using deductive and inductive methods, then coded de-identified transcripts using the constant comparison method. The analysis team proposed themes based on review of coded data, which were validated through member checking with a community advisory board serving Latinos in the region and finalized through discussion with the entire research team. RESULTS Between May and September 2023, we conducted 8 focus groups in English or Spanish with 48 participants. Focus groups were stratified by language and region and included: 3 (n=18 participants) Spanish urban groups, 2 (n=14 participants) Spanish rural groups, 1 (n=6 participants) English urban group, and 2 (n=10 participants) English rural groups. We identified 5 themes: (1) mHealth is seen as beneficial for promoting health and peace of mind; (2) some are unaware of, unfamiliar with, or uncomfortable with technology and may benefit from individualized support; (3) practical considerations create barriers to using mHealth in daily life; (4) mHealth raises concern for overreliance on technology; and (5) data sharing is seen as valuable for limited uses but raises privacy concerns. These themes illustrate key barriers to the benefits of mHealth that communities may face, provide insights on the role of mHealth within families, and examine the appropriate balance of data sharing and privacy protections. CONCLUSIONS These findings offer important insights that can help advance the development of mHealth that responds to community values and priorities.

Background: We compared critical flicker frequency (CFF) thresholds obtained using a novel, portable device "Beacon" with thresholds from the commercially available Lafayette Flicker Fusion System (Lafayette-FFS) in patients with cirrhosis. Methods: 153 participants with chronic liver disease underwent CFF testing using Beacon and Lafayette-FFS with a method-of-limits and/or forced-choice protocol. Results: Beacon demonstrated excellent test-retest reliability (intraclass correlation 0.91-0.97) and good correlation with the Lafayette-FFS values (intraclass correlation 0.77-0.84). Forced-choice CFFs were on average 4.1 Hz higher than MOL-D CFFs. Conclusions: Beacon can be self-administered by patients with chronic liver disease and cirrhosis to measure CFF, a validated screening test for minimal hepatic encephalopathy.