Our lab uses wearable sensors to study how daily activities of mothers and their infants contribute to bonding and development. We use sensors - similar to a Fitbit or an Alexa - to access our participants' activity "in the wild" -- that is, in day-to-day, real-world settings. Where a Fitbit helps people meet fitness goals by tracking steps, we are interested in learning about infants by "tracking" everyday activities that matter for development. To do so, we ask caregivers in our study to use sensors to record and share everyday playing, talking, and soothing interactions they have with their infants at home.
In our current study, english- and spanish-speaking mothers and their infants participate in three longitudinal sessions. Half of our participating mothers will have a history of childhood trauma, given that we know that these families are more likely to experience challenges bonding. Prenatally, we interview mothers about their mental health history and their relationships with their family as children. At six months, families will use wearable sensors to record and share their everyday interactions over the course of 24-72 hours. Our sensors record various types of data including arousal data, motion data, and audio recordings. At 12 months, families will come to UT to do some developmental assessments.
Interested students will have the opportunity to gain experience interacting with participants and data collection, and/or analysis of mobile-sensor datastreams. We will work in an interdisciplinary team bridging developmental science, clinical psychology, computer science, human-computer interaction, and electrical engineering.
Given the interdisciplinary nature of the project we welcome students from various disciplines including psychology, computer science, and electrical engineering.
We are looking for motivated and detail-oriented undergraduate students. This position may also be appropriate for a new graduate or master’s student looking to gain research experience. Students must commit 10 hours per week for three semesters in order to be considered and course credit can be offered via UGS320 or PSY357.
Spanish-speaking students interested in learning to recruit and collect data with our participating Spanish-speaking families are strongly encouraged to apply!
This is an ongoing project.
Students will contribute to the project according to their skills and interests. For example, psychology students will gain valuable research experience including running studies with infants and their caregivers, collecting and coding video and audio data, helping in study design or literature reviews, and attending a weekly lab meeting. Computer science, engineering, or iSchool students can gain experience developing new algorithms for automated activity detection or writing user-friendly apps for data collection. Electrical engineering students can also gain experience working on new hardware and firmware developments relevant to the project. Opportunities to work on analyses and contribute to peer-reviewed publications are available for interested students.
