Embedded Health Assessment
From: Stanford CS547 presentation - 01/28/2005
By: Margaret Morris - Intel Research - Portland

Embedded assessment is a new approach to early disease detection intended to
overcome delays that result from clinical practices and individual avoidance.
In this approach, health assessment is embedded into the environments of
daily life, as well as into applications that help people prevent and
compensate for illness. This approach leverages the capabilities of pervasive
computing for continuous and contextually sensitive data collection. I will
discuss embedded assessment in the context of Intel's Proactive Health. We
are currently studying ubiquitous computing platforms for assessing and
supporting social health in older adults. These systems include wireless
sensor networks to measure social interaction and dynamic visualizations of
this data. The behavioral feedback displays, which are in the homes of elders
and their caregivers for a month phase of the study, are intended to motivate
social interaction and to help participants see the dynamic qualities of
psychosocial health. Case examples will be used to illustrate hypotheses and
emerging findings. I will conclude with some embedded assessment concepts
developed in collaboration with the MIT PlaceLab. 

About the Speaker: Margaret Morris is a Senior Researcher in the Proactive
Health group at Intel. Margie identifies health needs through ethnographic
studies and works with an interdisciplinary team to develop and evaluate
technology prototypes. Margie is a clinical psychologist with expertise in
the study of health outcomes and person-environment relationships. In her
health research, she has evaluated the benefit of numerous psychological and
medical interventions on mental and physical wellbeing. She has examined the
way self-concepts change with age and illness, and developed a novel
assessment technique using network modeling to depict the influence of
illness on self-schemas. In her person-environment research, Margie has
studied the way that people respond to and shape the environment, broadly
defined to include ecology, architecture and technology. Her dissertation
examined the effect of sunlight on feelings of physical comfort and social
connectedness. She has also studied personality expression in professional
and personal environments and behavioral adaptation to workspaces. While
working in Sapient's Experience Modeling group, her research focused on
technology adoption and consumer experience.

Links:
http://www.intel.com/research/people/bios/morris_m.htm
http://www.intel.com/research/prohealth/