phd graduate

More multi-touch in the news!

| Michelle Annett

I am super excited that the tabletop I built for the Glenrose was featured in an article in the Wall Street Journal today (as well as a few other places)! It’s great to not only see the impact that the table has had on the Glenrose, but also see all the great research into technology-based rehabilitation interventions that is being conducted at other institutions. I hope that all this publicity will encourage more HCI researchers to think about entering into this awesome field and providing clients in therapy programs with some exciting, engaging technology to work with!

  • “Playing on a tablet as therapy”. Wall Street Journal, July 2011.
  • “Smartphones, Tablets Provide Therapy for Autism, Other Disabilities”. Mobiledia.com, July 2011. Also appeared on Forbes.com, July 2011.

We need participants for our user study!! [Updated]

| Michelle Annett

Update: Due to the overwhelming number of responses we have received, we are no longer looking for participants! Thank you very much to all of those who volunteered for our study!Dr. Walter Bischof, Fraser Anderson, and I have just started running a user study and are looking for people in the Edmonton area to participate! In our study, you will get to wear a super nifty motion capture jacket, have your muscular activity recorded by EMG electrodes, and use one of the AIRTouch multi-touch tabletops that Fraser and I have built. We are using all of these technologies to compare different rehabilitation activities: those performed on a multi-touch tabletop and those performed on a traditional table. The information collected during our study will be used to evaluate the potential of multi-touch tabletops in rehabilitation programs.

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We are looking for people who are 18 years of age or older who weigh less than 220 lbs (due to the sizes of motion capture jackets that we have). The study will take place in the AMMI Lab (Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta) and will take approximately one hour. Participants will receive $15 CAD for participating in the study and an additional $5 CAD if all tasks in the study are completed. The study is running from July 18th, 2011 to August 5th, 2011.

For more information and/or to schedule a convenient time to participate, please contact our research assistant, Gauri Chaggar, at chaggar1@ualberta.ca.

Tabletop Research in the News

| Michelle Annett

On October 20 and 22, the Glenrose held pseudo-press conferences to share the success of my multi-touch tabletop and it’s activities with the local Edmonton and St. Albert media. To date between 40 and 50 patients have used the tabletop, and many patients and therapists reported that it has produced many great results. I hope that these positive benefits will continue with new patients and that we will be able to make a few more tabletops for the Glenrose. I also hope that we can get many more tabletops into other hospitals and clinics around Alberta as well. If you would like more information on this project, please don’t hesitate to contact me!


Media links:

Internet, Windows 7, Arduinos, Interns

| Michelle Annett

So last week, I found out that someone hacked into the department’s system and as a result, it was decided that everything should be shut down. This meant that Internet access, webpages, ssh’ing, and basically everything was inaccessible. After finally getting access to my files, I decided to pull everything off of cs.ualber…. and instead move it to some other webspace that I have access to. Both cs.ualberta.ca/~mkannett and ualberta.ca/~mkannett will redirect to here so there should be no problems, except with hyper-linked resources. In the process of moving things over, I tried to update as many links as possible, but it is likely that I missed some. If you can’t access something, please send me an email (if possible) and alert me so that I can fix them and prevent others from encountering the same problem! I would greatly appreciate it.

This week I have also been preparing for the five interns that will be starting next week. Fraser and I have been working very hard to get tutorials, equipment, computers, and projects ready for our new lab mates! After everything gets settled down, I will be updating the blog more frequently with information on what I have been doing for the last few months, as well as what I will be doing in the future.

If you haven’t seen Toy Story 3, do it! Go Pixar!

Happy Eclipse Release day!!

This week in the news….UBC visitors and scholarships!

| Michelle Annett

Hello! It is only Tuesday, but it has already been a very busy week. Yesterday and today, the AMMI lab was fortunately enough to have Dr. Alan Kingstone, and two of his post-docs Tom Foulsham and Evan Risko visit our lab, share their research with us, and have a great dinner at Walter’s house. I had a great time hearing and watching videos of the projects that Dr. Kingstone’s lab has/is undertaking and appreciated all of their comments and ideas about my (potential) work.


Also, I found out that I was awarded an iCORE PhD Graduate Student Scholarship in Information and Communication Technologies (it’s a long title, i know) to help me pursue my rehabilitation-based research. I am really excited about this because this means that people outside of my lab actually believe in the potential of my research projects and ideas. A real motivation booster that’s for sure!!!