Browsing by Author "Esakia, Andria"
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- Mobile Devices for Facilitating Group Fitness and Visualization of Fitness DataLiu, Shuai (Virginia Tech, 2020-05-29)Lack of physical activity is a major problem contributing to diseases and poor health. Nowadays, mobile fitness apps serve in important roles in encouraging and facilitating people to do more physical exercise. Many apps focus primarily on individual behavioral strategies, such as displaying individual steps to encourage physical activity. Such strategies help evoke one's internal motivation such as peer recognition and competition achievement. However, such apps usually de-emphasize or ignore interpersonal behavioral strategies, such as team rank. And group-based strategies are very important in aspects such as peer recognition and can facilitate more physical activity. This research explores the design strategies of group-based dynamic approaches for encouraging physical activity in small-size groups. The development effort takes into account the different roles of mobile devices and laptops and the evaluation explored the effectiveness of the design.
- Role of Social Media and Computing in Organizations aiding Asylum Seekers and Undocumented Migrants in the United StatesRama Subramanian, Deepika (Virginia Tech, 2020-09-03)Every year, an increasing number of displaced people arrive at the United States of America's border to request asylum. Several groups are working to help migrants by providing them with essential items and services, housing, and legal advice. Drawing on ethnographic findings, this work presents a situated perspective of how citizen responders utilize technological systems to provide relief to those affected by the immigration crisis. Often, these citizens with common goals come together to form organizations. This study investigates how social media and technology support on-the-ground work, advocacy work, care-work, and invisible work of these organizations. Further, I highlight how technological systems fail organizations and how the emergence of care-work replaced these systems. Finally, I make design recommendations to social media and technological systems' design to boost the efficacy of collective crisis response by citizens.
- Smartwatch Centered System for Facilitating Group Processes of Small Teams in a Statewide Health Promotion ProgramEsakia, Andria (Virginia Tech, 2018-08-16)Physical inactivity is a major cause of disease in the United States and globally. Effective physical activity interventions often use community based approaches due to the demonstrated effectiveness of combining individual and group based behavioral strategies towards encouraging physical activity behaviors and influencing social norms. Such interventions can increase their impact by adopting technology based solutions to facilitate the underlying behavioral strategies. Current technologies for persuading physical activity primarily focus on facilitating the individual level behavioral strategies and de-emphasize the interpersonal aspects. This dissertation focuses on the development and evaluation of technology that is aimed at facilitating group dynamics-based strategies for promoting physical activity within small socially connected teams. This dissertation introduces a multi-component smartwatch-centered system (FitAware) that uses sensors to automatically track physical activity and leverages the advantages of the watch form factor to facilitate both group and individual level behavioral strategies via non-interruptive, glanceable, and frequent feedback updates. This manuscript describes the design and evaluation of FitAware in the context of an 8 week statewide physical activity community-based intervention, culminating in guidelines for system development that have been tested in educational settings.