MONITORING OBESITY PATIENTS WITH INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGIES

Natalia Romero Her­rera is an Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor at the Fac­ul­ty of Indus­tri­al Design at Delft Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy. She does research on human com­put­er inter­ac­tion and she stud­ies how tech­nolo­gies can help and encour­age peo­ple to have a more active role in chang­ing their own behav­iour. For her cur­rent research, which focus­es on track­ing and con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing the behav­iour of obe­si­ty patients, Natalia applied for the Data Refine­ment Fund, offered by 4TU.ReseachData. This grant enables her team to take the research a step fur­ther. The pub­li­ca­tion of the dataset in the 4TU.ResearchData archive ensures that oth­er researchers can also make use of her work, which fur­ther stim­u­lates the impact of Natalia’s research. 

Natalia Romero Her­rera (Pho­to: Jan van der Heul)

Natalia struc­tures her obser­va­tions in three cat­e­gories: social, per­son­al and sit­u­a­tion­al con­texts. Rel­e­vant fac­tors with­in these con­texts, that could explain a person’s behav­iour, could be a per­son­’s val­ues, beliefs, genet­ics, eco­nom­ic sta­tus, habits or exter­nal temp­ta­tions. To mon­i­tor this, Natalia uses sen­sors, elec­tron­ic sur­vey­ing tech­nolo­gies and inter­views, so that she can acti­vate peo­ple to cap­ture as much of these con­texts as pos­si­ble. Her par­tic­i­pants pro­vide pos­i­tive insights as they engage in these activ­i­ties, since many of them are eager to get to know the deep­er rea­sons behind their eat­ing behav­iour.

The extent to which the dif­fer­ent fac­tors are rel­e­vant, depends on the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the humans involved, mak­ing the research a very per­son­al and intrigu­ing encounter for the par­tic­i­pants. By redesign­ing cur­rent dieti­tians’ tools that cap­ture food intake, Natalia real­ly wants to go beyond the pos­si­ble feel­ings of shame and dis­com­fort that obese clients expe­ri­ence when using these tools, ulti­mate­ly hop­ing to cap­ture the true feel­ings and habits of her par­tic­i­pants. This way, the activ­i­ty of food intake report­ing real­ly becomes part of the participant’s life and it helps them to get ade­quate and cus­tomized help for their prob­lems.

Natalia is very hap­py that she got the oppor­tu­ni­ty to apply for the Data Refine­ment Fund:

“I real­ly believe that with­out the funds, we would not be able to cre­ate a project of the size and the impact that it has now. We cre­ate var­i­ous types of data and espe­cial­ly in this project the data itself is quite per­son­al and sen­si­tive. The funds enable my team to inter­pret every piece of the data with utmost care, with­out hav­ing to think too much about finan­cial con­straints. My tal­ent­ed stu­dent assis­tants, who are financed by the funds, help with the exe­cu­tion of the cod­ing schemes, all need­ed to fur­ther stan­dard­ize the data. Fur­ther­more,  they care­ful­ly anonymize the data, to pro­tect the pri­va­cy of the par­tic­i­pants while at the same time ensur­ing that the data remains use­ful for oth­er researchers. All these prac­tices make the research data even rich­er!”

Open­ly pub­lish­ing a dataset is not very com­mon in the field of human cen­tred tech­nol­o­gy design. For Natalia, how­ev­er, pub­lish­ing has many advan­tages and it real­ly opened up a new world of oppor­tu­ni­ties for her. She explains:

“The data in itself is not easy to col­lect, so if peo­ple want to build fur­ther on my research, I am very hap­py to sup­port them. Also, I believe that my data can be seen through many dif­fer­ent lens­es, lead­ing to dif­fer­ent out­comes. Even lin­guists or pol­i­cy-mak­ers could use my work.”

The dataset itself is not the only thing Natalia pub­lish­es. She also attach­es her code­books, inter­pre­ta­tions and way-of-thought. 

“I pub­lish almost every­thing, as I real­ly want to be as trans­par­ent as pos­si­ble. Oth­er researchers are free to use my data as they want, I will not pre­scribe a pre­de­fined way of look­ing at it. I am very curi­ous to learn more about the impact that my pub­lished data will have.” 

On a per­son­al lev­el, pub­lish­ing the dataset actu­al­ly encour­aged Natalia to work even more rig­or­ous­ly than she already did.  

“I think that pub­lish­ing the data makes you even more con­scious about the solid­i­ty of your work­flow. Open­ly shar­ing my work has def­i­nite­ly increased the qual­i­ty and rigour of the dataset, so to me it is a real win-win sit­u­a­tion!”

Link to the dataset referred in this post on 4TU.ResearchData
Author: Daen Smits, Trainee Research Data Offi­cer, 4TU.Centre for Research Data | TU Delft Library
Cov­er image by Steve Buissinne via Pix­abay