People from the lab at table 1:

People from the lab at table 1 with Alvin included:

People from the lab at table 2:

Lunch plate #1:

Lunch plate #2:

From the IML lab to everyone out there, have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. As 2007 winds down, it has been a great year at IML, and hopefully 2008 will even be a better year.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Oh yes, the skeleton that you see there was a former grad student at IML who didn’t graduate hehe

See you there!

Today is World Usability Day, where the focus is usability in healthcare. In Toronto, the Toronto chapter of SIGCHI called TorCHI is having a meeting of usability experts and presentations at the Bahen Center at the University of Toronto. Ilona Posner is introducing World Usability Day, she is talking about the problems that she experienced in trying to see the webcast of World Usability Day from Boston, explaining about the usability problems of web software and computers. The organizers of this event are TorCHI and Usability Professionals Association Worldwide. Last year World Usability Day 2006 had 40000 participants, 225 events, in 175 cities and 35 countries. In Toronto, there were 2 events and 200+ attendees. Tonight’s program is the following:
1) Web 2.0 and Healthcare, 2) Patient Safety and Human Factors, and 3) Reality Checkup: A Conversation with a Physician.

The first presenter is Holly Witteman, PhD Candidate in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto. The topic is Usability, eHealth and Web 2.0. Within eHealth, Web 2.0 is characterized by open community and communication in the health area, and the technologies applied to health. Blogs can be used for personal expression. Wikis can be used for collaboration for medical education, for creating repositories of information. Social networks are embedded within the Web 2.0 web sites like patientslikeme. CarePages is also another example of social networking site for health care, also sermo is another example. Mashups can be used to look at disease outbreaks around the world, and sicknesses around locations using mapping tools like Google Maps. Tags are also another technology used in health context like in YouTube. Podcasts are also a popular medium for distributing information in audio. So what does this have to do with usability? User-generated content introduces the notion of credibility, is the information credible and valid. In health care, the information is evaluated by a community of experts to determine the credibility. When it comes to health information online, one size does not fit all. There are individual differences and need to be incorporated in usability assessments.

The second speaker was Anjum Chagpar from the University Health Network who talked about a Systems Approach to Patient Safety. She is the manager of a lab looking at next generation medical devices. She gave an example of Denise Melanson who died because she was infused with 4 days of a drug dose within 4 hours. The cause of this accident was multifold. The label on the drug was difficult to find the dose information, the dose information was in brackets (1.2 mL/hour) instead the nurse read the first number which was 28.8 mL/24 hour (which was given in an hour). Second, there were interface issues with the infusion pump. There was no check for unsafe values to enter so the pump allowed the nurse to enter 28.8. All this shows that there is a need to design systems that minimize errors. Health care is changing from secrecy to disclosure, from a blame culture to a just culture. Why do we have poor design in healthcare systems? Because the devices used in healthcare have different market drivers from consumer technology, the devices are not high tech because there is high risk. Human factors is not incorporated in the design process because due to the complexity of the health care environments and there are no consistent user interfaces. Therefore, health care needs human factors.

Happy World Usability Day!

On Technorati: World Usability Day

IML is busy at the CASCON conference again this year. We’re hosting the CASCON blog, as well as Alvin Chin, Mark Chignell and Sara Darvish are co-chairing the session Tagging as a Social Contract, part of the Second Working Conference on Social Computing and Business on Monday, October 22 from 12:30 pm to 2:30 pm. Sara and Mark will be talking about Indexing and Tagging, What is the Difference, and Alvin will be talking about Inferring Community from Tagging.

We will also have a booth in the Technology Showcase of a research project called Video Web 2.0: Collaborative Tagging in Web Video, so come to see us on Monday through Thursday. On Wednesday, Alvin Chin will be presenting the CASCON short paper on Identifying Active Subgroups in Online Communities, and Sacha Chua will be presenting Using Web 2.0 to Locate Expertise.

On Technorati: cascon2007, cascon07

PhD student Alvin Chin will be presenting a paper in the Hypertext conference next week entitled “Identifying Subcommunities Using Cohesive Subgroups in Social Hypertext” on Wednesday, September 12 in Manchester, UK. Look for the paper, slides and podcast shortly after the conference.

You can also visit Alvin’s blog as he will blog about the events at the conference, as well as post photos on Flickr, and possibly make a podcast of events at the conference.

On Technorati: Hypertext07

On Technorati: Interactive Media Lab, Hypertext07, CASCON07

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Apparently, thanks to Google and this article, you just have to repair the wp_comments table and then the comments start flowing again and the error is gone.

Phew!

IML will have a presence at the Pervasive conference in Toronto. Alvin Chin will be presenting a talk at the doctoral colloquium called “Searching for a Sense of Virtual Community in Social Hypertext” tomorrow afternoon.

The Pervasive conference starts tomorrow in the heart of the city of Toronto with workshops and the doctoral colloquium. The main conference starts on Monday May 14 and goes through to Wednesday May 16. There’s a great line of speakers , papers, tutorials , demos, and videos. And there’s dinner at the CN Tower on Tuesday night! As well, there’s a keynote by Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware.

It should be a great conference!