NEWS FROM THE CENTER FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY...
Transcript of NEWS FROM THE CENTER FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY...
The so-called “observer effect” has well known
manifestations in IT, where watching a process output,
say, may slow it down, cause an I/O error, or otherwise
interfere. It is more famous though in particle physics
where simply peeking at an electron radically alters its
course.
A far more common example of the observer effect is
described in this issue of the CITRIS Signal’s first story,
“Smart Bandages to Track Wounds Through Healing”,
which covers upgrades to the most fundamental piece
Dear Friends of CITRIS,
of medical equipment: the bandage. Until
now, the same shield that kept a wound
safe also obscured possible infection or
other pathology from clinical observation.
Moreover, removing a bandage to see what
was happening beneath it too frequently
introduced new infections or aggravated
the wound. And for wounds buried deep in
the body after surgery, the medical costs of
observing it directly would be very high.
CITRIS engineers are addressing this
problem by printing flexible electronic
systems directly onto bandages that can
track the healing process without harming it.
Not only that, but the same subtle electrical
fields detected by the bandages could be
manipulated to speed and improve the
healing process itself. We’re not quite talking
about Star Trek Tricorders. But if they ever do
evolve, our devices will be their ancestors.
The nanotechnologies, printable electronics
processes, materials development, sensor
“Turning the Observer Effect on its Head”, Letter from Paul K. Wright and Camille Crittenden, Director and Deputy Director of CITRIS
A CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative project helps injured veterans navigate the cognitive obstacle course back to the voting booth.
An interdisciplinary team of UCB and UCSF researchers uses printable electronics to make bandages that can track—and potentially advance—the healing of wounds.
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NEWS FROMTHE CENTER FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH IN THE INTEREST OF SOCIETY
NOV/DEC 2013 ISSUE
T h e CITR IS SIGN A L
IN THIS ISSUE
T UR NING THE OB SER V ER EFFECT ON ITS HE A D
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2 The CITRIS Signal Nov/Dec 2013
deployment, wireless communication expertise,
and cooperative integration of all of these fields
make this project one that hits CITRIS’s sweet spot.
We will be thrilled to watch this one quicken.
CITRIS researchers are taking steps to accelerate
the healing and return to full public life of injured
combat veterans as well. Too many of these men
and women, so thoroughly engaged overseas,
avoid democratic participation at the ballot box
when they get home. Especially for those who have
received traumatic head injuries, the attendant
difficulties with attention and short-term
memory make voting a daunting and sometimes
overwhelming task. Data and Democracy Initiative
researchers are developing a new tablet-based
tool, Vote Your Mind, to help compensate for
these deficits and create a more reliable and user-
friendly experience in political participation.
CITRIS jump-starts innovation among affiliated
faculty by offering seed-grants for promising ideas
pursued by collaborative multi-campus teams.
Over the last five years we have distributed more
than $6 million to support ideas that have gone
on to win nearly $40 million in outside research
awards; a pretty impressive six-plus-fold return
on investment! Just as important, the competition
fuels the search for ways to address some of our
most pressing societal challenges. The seed-
grant program for 2014 will be announced soon,
so keep an eye on this website. The deadline for
submissions will be in late February. The smart
and out-of-the-box ideas we get each year from
our four campuses are not only inspiring, they
also are engines of hope. We can hardly wait to
see what creative ideas emerge this year in our
four focus areas: energy, health care, intelligent
infrastructure, and data and democracy.
Keep up the good work,
Paul Wright and Camille Crittenden
Paul K. WrightDirector, CITRIS Banatao Institute@CITRIS Berkeley
Camille CrittendenDeputy Director, CITRIS Banatao Institute@CITRIS Berkeley
VOTE YO UR MIND
photo credit: vox_efx (flickr.com)b y G o r d y S l a c k
A C I T R I S D a t a a n d D e m o c r a c y I n i t i a t i v e p r o j e c t h e l p s i n j u r e d v e t e r a n s n a v i g a t e t h e c o g n i t i v e o b s t a c l e c o u r s e b a c k t o t h e v o t i n g b o o t h .
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Thousands of US veterans have suffered
traumatic brain injuries from roadside
bombs and mortar explosions in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of these injuries
are bloody—the results of shrapnel or bullets
penetrating the skull—while others are
invisible to the casual observer, the products
of shockwaves that move through the air after
an explosion and cause concussion. Both
kinds of traumatic brain injury (TBI) can be
disruptive and even disabling. Even when a
primary injury to the head appears to have
healed, vets commonly sustain short- or long-
term problems with organization, attention,
and memory.
Preparing to vote can be a daunting task
even for the most organized and attentive of
citizens. But for men and women with mild
cognitive impairment, such as veterans with
TBI, the task can be frustrating, leading voters
to quit before completing the whole ballot
or avoiding the process altogether. A new
tool being developed by CITRIS’s Data and
Democracy Initiative (DDI), Vote Your Mind,
aims to make voter guides, and hence the
ballot box itself, more accessible to individuals
with attention and memory disabilities.
Several smart-phone-based tools are designed
to aid vets with TBI; some help them remember
to take medications or keep appointments,
others help with communication, and still
others focus on rehabilitation, encouraging
the brain’s own plastic properties to stretch in
order to recover lost functions. But the tablet-
based Vote Your Mind will be the first devoted
specifically to making it easier for veterans—
or anyone with cognitive impairments—to
maintain their full civic participation by voting,
says Dan Gillette, the app’s co-developer and
a Visiting Researcher at DDI.
phot
o co
urte
sty
of w
ikip
edia
.org
CT scan showing cerebral contusions, hemorrhage within the hemispheres, subdural hematoma, and skull fractures. TBI can cause a host of physical, cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral effects, and outcome can range from complete recovery to permanent disability or death.
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4 The CITRIS Signal Nov/Dec 2013
Supported by a grant from The Information
Technology and Information Foundation (ITIF),
Vote Your Mind will make voter guides more
accessible and useful to people suffering from
attention and memory problems so common after
a traumatic brain injury. The program breaks the
often arcane and densely organized voter guide
material into smaller, more easily grasped and
considered parts. It also allows users to interact
with material in ways that help sustain attention,
retain memory, and make decisions that reflect a
user’s opinions and values.
“We use a lot of feedback control loops,” says Greg
Niemeyer, the project’s principle investigator
and co-founder of DDI. “Propositions are often
complex, as are candidates’ reasons for running
for office. We do not want to oversimplify
them. But there should be extra effort put
into structuring them so that they become as
intelligible as possible. We’re not changing the
content. We’re just giving it a lot more and better
structure.”
Niemeyer recounts finding two bound and
printed documents in the mail one day—a Banana
Republic catalog and a voter guide. The clothing
catalog was “really compelling, transparent, and
almost irresistible,” he says. “The whole thing
is connected to contemporary media reality. I
wanted to open it, to peruse it, and then, maybe
too often, to buy something from it.” The Voter
Guide on the other hand is soporific; colorless,
dull, with huge impenetrable-looking blocks of
text. “The typesetting seems to follow arcane
rules that have not been reconsidered at all in
light of developments in media.”
“The idea of Vote Your Mind is to keep people
engaged by making the experience more
interesting and accessible,” says Faraz Farzin, a
developmental psychologist consulting on the
project. “If it is more engaging, users are likely
to spend more time on task, which usually
leads to greater comprehension and greater
understanding of the information.”
As users of Vote Your Mind read individual
paragraphs, they are prompted to mark each one
with one of three marks: a check, an exclamation
mark, or a question mark. The exact meaning
of these symbols is left to the user, but simply
interacting with the text helps users to remember
what they have read and makes it easier to
review, says Farzin, a long-time collaborator with
Niemeyer. Farzin earned her PhD at UC Davis
where she worked at the CITRIS Social Apps
Lab and the Center for Mind and Brain. She is
currently a research scientist at Lumosity.
In a systematic, evenly applied way, the software
will break down and simplify the way content
in the voter guide is presented, says Farzin. This
includes “chunking,” or breaking down headings
and body text, “making it come on line in a more
goal- and user-directed sequence so users can
read and advance to the next subject at their
own speed. Pacing is critical to keeping users
engaged and not frustrated,” she says.
Vote Your Mind also lets users annotate voter
guide text by selecting icons that represent
their opinions. At the end of each section,
this information is visualized to assist voters
in making up their mind or confirming their
decision about a candidate or issue.
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The application also compiles a sample ballot,
recording choices as users move through it
making decisions about candidates, propositions,
and measures. The sample ballot can be printed
at the end of the process and be brought into the
voting booth.
For users with vision problems or difficulty
reading, the device will also use auditory
information and text-to-speech translation, says
Farzin.
For the project to succeed, it must appear—and
indeed be—politically neutral. That is a tricky
challenge, Gillette says, when even an aesthetic
preference might imply political associations. “We
are supporting the current electoral system,” says
Gillette, “not advocating for a different system or
advancing any kind of political agenda. We are
just trying to make voting your mind easier.”
Traditionally when it comes to voting, content
reigns supreme; any design is suspect. The state-
sponsored voter guide itself is not supposed to be
rhetorical. Rather, it should be a neutral crucible
in which charged political rhetoric can be safely
contained. But voter guides could be designed
in a way that makes pro and con arguments for
a measure equally transparent, Niemeyer says,
and that inspires people to vote. We want the
voter guide to remind people that as voters they
are very powerful. As they are now designed, the
guides makes a lot of people feel powerless, he
says.
The four-member Vote Your Mind research team,
which includes DDI Director Camille Crittenden,
will soon conduct a pilot study of the tablet
application with the help of a group of Berkeley
students, who are also vets who suffer from mild
cognitive impairment.
“Voting is an important symbolic step back into
society for many injured veterans,” says Gillette.
“If I can vote, it says a lot about my validity and
the validity of the group I belong to. That has
been true with race, disability, and citizenship.
And it’s true for injured vets.”
“These veterans have invested a lot in this
democracy already,” says Niemeyer. “When they
served they had the highest possible stakes in
the democratic system. We want to facilitate their
continued engagement at home.”
“
These veterans have invested a lot in this democracy already...when they served they had the highest possible stakes in the democratic system. We want to facilitate their continued engagement at home.“ - Greg Niemeyer, Faculty Co-director of Data and Democracy Initiative and
Associate Professor in Art Practice, CITRIS @ Berkeley “
Dan Gillette co-developed the Vote Your Mind project, which aims to make the voting process simpler for vets with brain injuries.
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6 The CITRIS Signal Nov/Dec 2013
Most scrapes and boo-boos heal quickly
and completely with traditional, over-
the-counter bandages. However, for
deeper cuts or surgical incisions, something
more is needed so that physicians can monitor
the healing process happening underneath the
bandage. “Right now, if you have a bandaged
wound, the only way to tell its status is to remove
the bandage and look,” says Michael Maharbiz,
Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. Neglecting
to inspect wounds can allow infections and
other serious pathology to go undetected and
untreated. But removing a bandage may expose a
wound to infections, disrupt the healing process,
or structurally damage the wound itself.
Maharbiz is working with colleagues to develop
a bandage that reads electrical fields naturally
emitted by wounds to track the rate and extent of
healing. This new tool could potentially be applied
to internal surgical sites and sutures, tracking
internal healing and then wirelessly sending data
out of the body to an external processor. Currently,
there is no good way for doctors to track progress
of internal wounds so this bandage could be used
in numerous situations.
The project, called FRONTS (Flexible Resorbable
Organic Nanomaterial Therapeutic Systems) and
sponsored by the NSF, employs an interdisciplinary
group of researchers from UC Berkeley and UCSF,
to develop the bandage device. Maharbiz focuses
on the project’s nanosensors, but the group
also includes specialists in printed electronics,
biocompatible materials, surgical devices and
procedures, and the physiology of wound healing.
After an injury, epidermal cells replicate and
move into the area of a wound in order to close
it up and start the healing process. This causes
ionic concentrations to shift, a change that
generates subtle but characteristic electrical
fields. The fields are detectable by sensor arrays
that can be printed onto a flexible substrate that
is part of the bandage itself. UC Berkeley EECS
Professors Vivek Subramanian and Ana Claudia
Arias head the electronic printing efforts and can
SM A RT B A ND A GES TO TR A CK W O UNDS THR O U GH HE A LING
b y G o r d y S l a c k
A n i n t e r d i s c i p l i n a r y t e a m o f U C B a n d U C S F r e s e a r c h e r s u s e s p r i n t a b l e e l e c t r o n i c s t o m a k e b a n d a g e s t h a t c a n t r a c k — a n d p o t e n t i a l l y a d v a n c e — t h e h e a l i n g o f w o u n d s .
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Nov/Dec 2013 The CITRIS Signal 7
print circuits, sensors, and batteries on all kinds
of flexible materials, including biocompatible
ones that are “thin, light, flexible, and disposable,”
Subramanian says.
“To get data out of the wounds we need a thin-film
battery, we need electrodes to do measurements,
and, in the longer term, if we are going to put
this inside the body, we need electronics that will
dissolve away,” notes Subramanian.
It has long been known that wounds, when healing,
create signature electrical fields. “But no one has
done a good job of putting all of this information
together to build good models of wound healing,
and make those models tractable, make them
useful in the clinic,” says Maharbiz. The novel step
embodied in the FRONTS project is the detection
and precise measurement of those fields over
time, thereby non-invasively tracking the healing
process. Together with Maharbiz, Subramanian is
developing ways to automatically interpret and
analyze the electrical signals given off by wounds.
For simplicity’s sake, the first application for such
bandages would be on damaged tissue on the
outside of the body. “For on-skin measurements,”
says Subramanian, “the materials do not have to
dissolve; they are just thin-film printed systems
integrated into bandages.”
The on-skin concept is currently being tested on
animals models at the University of California in
San Francisco. Shuvo Roy, a UCSF professor in
bioengineering, and Michael Harrison, a pediatric
surgeon and professor emeritus also at UCSF, are
preparing for clinical human trials if the animal
models are successful. “We already have a clinic
and a practitioner in the plan so we can move
quickly to testing the bandages in the clinic,” says
Maharbiz.
The group is developing a more complex and
challenging version of the bandage as well.
It relies on the same principles, but this array
of sensors would be left inside the body after
surgery in order to track the healing progress of
internal lesions created during surgery. In those
cases, unless doctors reopen the surgical site, it
is impossible to track how fast and well a wound
is healing. The sensors themselves could be
embedded deep in the abdominal cavity at the
site of the wound but have a thin tail-like antenna
connecting them to a chip near the skin that
sends the data to a receiver outside the body.
The body tends to reject equipment left inside
it for very long, though, so the research group
is experimenting with non-toxic materials that
will biodegrade and be absorbed by the body.
Everything from the batteries to the circuit
boards must be biocompatible, non-toxic, and
resorbable, says Subramanian.
Professor Michel Maharbiz is developing smart bandages that read electrical fields to track wound healing.
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8 The CITRIS Signal Nov/Dec 2013
Beyond just tracking the progress of healing
wounds, the group is hoping eventually to
influence that healing by the introduction and
manipulation of electrical fields. This part of the
project is “still pretty speculative,” says Maharbiz.
However, there is strong evidence, he says, that
wounds not only produce electrical fields, but
that whole communities of cells—particularly
epithelial cells—are also responsive to them.
The electrical disturbance to epithelial cells
created by a wound is immediate and is thought
to trigger a process known as galvanotaxis in
which cells proliferate and migrate to the site
of injury. By manipulating the electrical fields
around a wound, it may be possible to influence
how it heals, minimizing harmful scar tissue
and maximizing the chances for full and robust
recovery, says Maharbiz. “It would help doctors
gain control over how the healing takes place,
more than just making it go fast.”
Applying electrical fields is a much trickier
engineering and clinical problem than just
reading them, says Maharbiz, because these fields
may cause unintended electro-chemical side
effects (in addition to tissue healing) that doctors
would first have to understand and control for.
Roy is also investigating additional sensors that
could be made part of a bandage system to track
more kinds of information emitted by wounds:
pressure and oxygen sensors, for example, could
help detect the emergence of pressure ulcers,
a common problem for hospital patients who
remain in one position for a long time. With
the population getting older and assistive care
becoming ever more prominent, a device that can
assist with preventing ulcers in patients would be
very useful.
No one has done a good job of putting all of this information together to build good models of wound healing, and make those models tractable, make them useful in the clinic.“ - Michel Maharbiz, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley “
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Nov/Dec 2013 The CITRIS Signal 9
11/20 Policy Impact of TelemedicineJana Katz-Bell [UC Davis School of Medicine]Research Exchange Seminar Series, Health Care Initiative
This talk will explore these themes and the importance for on-going, multi-disciplinary engagement. Jana Katz-Bell will approach this topic not as a healthcare provider nor an engineer -- but as a person who has been involved in implementation of many telehealth applications over the past decade and from a policy and sustainability perspective. 12-1pm, Free with RegistrationBanatao AuditoriumSutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeleyhttp://citris.eventbrite.com
UPCOMING EVENTS
11/22 Automating Demand Response:From Hot Summer Events to Any TimeMary Ann Piette [LBNL]Research Exchange Seminar Series, i4Energy Initiative
Mary Ann Piette is the Head of the Building Technology and Urban Systems Department and has been at LBNL since 1983. She is also the Director of the Demand Response Research Center (DRRC). She develops and evaluates low-energy and demand response technologies for buildings and specializes in commissioning, energy information systems, benchmarking, and diagnostics. 12-1pm, Free with RegistrationBanatao AuditoriumSutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeleyhttp://citris.eventbrite.com
12/04 Community-Scale Renewable Energy MicrogridsMichael Isaacson [UC Santa Cruz]Research Exchange Seminar Series, i4Energy Initiative
Professor Isaacson is the principle investigator of the Sustainable Engineering and Ecological Design (SEED) research program at UCSC, which recently received a five-year $4.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to fund clean energy research and educational programs. 12-1pm, Free with RegistrationBanatao AuditoriumSutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeleyhttp://citris.eventbrite.com
Visit the CITRIS EventBrite page for events details and registration:http://citris.eventbrite.com
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THE CITRIS SIGNAL
CITRIS Editor, Yvette Subramanian
Contributing Writer, Gordy Slack
Design by Cheryl Martinez
gordyslack.blogspot.com
CITRIS’s mission, to “shorten the pipeline” between research innovations and their application to real-world problems, requires investment from a range of partners. We receive funding from the University of California, as well as corporations, foundations, and individuals committed to improving the lives of Californians and others around the world. If you would like to support our work in health care, energy, intelligent infrastructures, or data and democracy, please consider making a gift online or contact our Director of Finance, [email protected]. Thank you!
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