Megan Caulfield, Julia Larson, and Abby Ensogna Present at CAPWIC and SIEDS 2024

Passive Haptic Learning at SIEDS 2024

Megan Caulfield presented the results of her honors thesis, “Braille Learning using Haptic Feedback” at the 2024 IEEE Systems and Information Engineering Symposium on May 3rd at the University of Virginia. Her research examined the effectiveness of haptic feedback when learning to read and write braille which is motivated by the challenges of sighted parents and teachers learning braille to support their visually impaired children and students. She was advised by myself, Dr. Laura Deportes (Education), and Dr. Daniel Castaneda (Engineering). A special thanks also to the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind for allowing us to tour their facilities.

Flash Talks at CAPWIC 2024

Two new members of the Wearable Computing Group, Julia Larson (Engineering) and Abby Ensogna (Computer Science), presented initial efforts on their work at the ACM Capitol Region Celebration of Women in Computing (CAPWIC).

Julia’s talk entitled, “Design of a Wearable Coaching System for Shoulder Rehabilitation” discussed her preliminary results extending the research group’s haptic feedback system from two-dimensional motion into additional degrees of freedom to support shoulder and upper-arm rehabilitation. Abby described the pressing challenge in labeling human-activity data in her talk, “Labelling Data in the Field of Wearable Computing”. Her real-time labeling tool for human motions will help the lab more effectively collect data in field user studies.