Team behind Stroke Kinect Receives Funding

As part of the Frontier of Innovation Scholars Program (CSE Publication), the Stroke-Kinect proposal led by Design Lab faculty Nadir Weibel and colleagues in the engineering department and the school of medicine, was awarded $50,000 towards two graduate student awards to fund this work. It was selected among over 400 high caliber proposals and will focus on a sensor based approach to multimodal stroke signature.

What is Stroke-Kinect?

Stroke-Kinect is a new approach to characterizing the severity of ischemic stroke. Stroke-Kinect exploits cutting-edge pervasive sensing technologies that unobtrusively capture body motion, eye tracking, and speech. The goal is to use multimodal sensing to understand the dynamics of human behavior and automatically assess clinical deficit scales more frequently and precisely than current human resources allow. This will remove the subjectivity of human analysis in characterizing ischemic stroke, allow a more accurate quantification of specific behavioral patterns in individuals who have undergone a stroke, and enable rapid observation-diagnosis feedback loops by informing clinicians of patient deficits in real-time. Our team will leverage experience and capabilities to collect and analyze multimodal data in the healthcare domain using pervasive sensing technology, multi-year experience in neural computation and bioengineering, and access to the UCSD Stroke Clinic and key expertise in neurology, stroke diagnosis, and stroke rehabilitation.

Who is the team?

Nadir Weibel, PhD, Research Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering, Jacobs School of Engineering
Brett Meyer, MD, Professor Neuroscience, School of Medicine
Gert Cauwenberghs, PhD, Professor Bioengineering, Jacobs School of Engineering
Vishwajith (Vish) Ramesh, Graduate Student (PhD), Bioengineering
Steven Rick, Graduate Student (PhD), Computer Science and Engineering

What is Stroke-Kinect?

Who is the team?

What is Stroke-Kinect?

Who is the team?

Nazima Ahmad is Putting People Over Profits by Connecting Art and Design at the Design Lab

If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that our communities are more important than ever. The pandemic has changed the ways in which we experience and perceive community—sometimes even causing us to feel that it has vanished. The past two years have been an uncertain time for those involved in the arts, with many creative professionals being impacted by dwindling audiences and interest. Nazima Ahmad, a Designer-in-Residence at The Design Lab, noticed the crumbling connection between artists and consumers and sought to find a way to mend it. Working with fellow designer Michelle Hoogenhout, the two were able to come up with City Canvas, a concept developed in collaboration with the Arts and Commission Department of the City of San Diego that won the 2020 SCALE San Diego Urban Innovation Challenge that works to make connecting with local artists easier for San Diego residents.

“Working with the city on that project was all-around trying to figure out how to promote the creative economy of San Diego,” says Ahmad of the goal of the project. Not only was the project a great success at Design Week, but it is also what led Ahmad to The Design Lab.

Design Lab Uc San Diego Ailie Fraser Tricia Ngoon

CHI 2018 Conference Spotlights Design Lab Work

This year’s ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — more commonly known…

In San Diego, ‘Smart’ Streetlights Spark Surveillance Reform

Photo: Google Streetview

Lilly Irani, Design Lab member and UCSD Communications professor, was recently quoted in a Bloomberg City Lab piece on surveillance in San Diego. Read more about the "smart streetlight" program, privacy concerns, and new legislation efforts here.

“With body-worn cameras, and with the streetlights footage, and with drone footage, the people who have the money to maintain those technologies and control the data flow of those technologies get to control who gets access to the footage and who gets to narrate its public meaning,” said Irani.

Design Lab Uc San Diego Don Norman Creative Education

Rethinking Design Education

Don Norman, Design Lab Director

The Challenge

The requirements of the 21st century are quite different than those of earlier years. New needs continually arise, along with new tools, technologies, and materials. Designers are starting to address some of the major societal issues facing the planet. Does design education prepare them to work with and lead the multidisciplinary teams required to work on these complex sociotechnical systems?

The Origins

We are embarking on a serious effort to rethink design education for the 21st century. We started with the multiple thoughtful articles in two special issues of the journal She Ji on design education (download from our website). This inspired us to assemble a team of senior designers from academia and business to serve as a steering committee to start a large effort to rethink design education.