Researcher with 4 years of experience in human-computer interaction, with a focus on those with cognitive impairments and health-related projects. Experienced with developing and running user studies, participatory design workshops, design workshops, semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. Produces iOS apps for research studies which have been deployed to participants remotely and local. Strong understanding of the wizard of oz methodology
Experiences
Research Intern, Swansea University 2018
After graduating from Swansea University, I worked on placement between Swansea University and Morrison Hospital’s Brain Trauma Centre with participants with cognitive impairments to enable them to access the maker and hacker culture. This research was designed to investigate co-creating between participants.
I was responsible for developing all activities carried out by participants. I was also responsible also for ordering components. I had to ensure that all components that we had were to standard, tracking the budget and verifying that ideas would work and were achievable.
Teaching Assistant, Swansea University 2018-2022
During my time employed as a teaching assistant at Swansea University, I supported teaching several computer science modules including Human-computer interaction (second year); user experience (third year); web applications (third year and masters level), hardware and devices (third year and masters) and embedded systems (third year and masters). I have also assisted with marking duties.
Education
Swansea University
Department of Computer Science, Swansea University
– MRES in Computing and Future Interactive Technology: 2018-2021. Qualification awarded.
– BSC Computer Science: Honours: 2015-2018. Awarded Upper Second-Class
– Pursuit a PhD in Making with People with Cognitive Impairments before exiting the programme due to delays resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic: 2019-2022
Publications
Ellis, K., Dao, E., Smith, O., Lindsay, S., & Olivier, P. (2021, May). Tapeblocks: A making toolkit for people living with intellectual disabilities. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-12).
Smith, Osian, and Stephen Lindsay. “Looking At Situationally-Induced Impairments And Disabilities (SIIDs) With People With Cognitive Brain Injury.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.06132 (2019).
Personal Profile
During my time at Swansea University, I have also been a senior student ambassador along with a Lab demonstrator for all teaching years (foundation to master’s level). During my teaching period, I also taught modules that I had little experience in and also learnt prior to the lab sessions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the modules I supported used discord for lab and teamwork, however,
requesting help was difficult due to the lack of a queue mechanism. As a result, I developed LabBot – a tool that replicated the “hands up” labs. Labbot was used on at least 4 models in the university (I collect analytical data due to potential GDPR concerns) and was available for public use.
In 2017, I took part in an NHS Hackathon where I worked with doctors who required a solution for patients to take responsibility for their own health care by measuring heart rate, blood pressure and glucose levels with the equipment that they already had at home. The app we developed would allow patients to record and monitor their measurements which their doctor could access and decide if the data was high due to a medical condition or White Coat Hypertension which 37% of patients could suffer from. My role within the team was to produce a prototype software for the investors to see the concept of our app. We were successful in our presentation and bid and a medical doctor and I took the project forward and developed the project further with the £7,500 grant/prize money we won. We presented our app to the Bevan Commission in September and were accepted into the Bevan Exemplars cohort for 2017 to 2018.
In my third year at university, I developed an iOS application that investigated contextualising blood pressure through a mobile application. From this, I ran a user study with doctors who dealt with patients suffering from high blood pressure. The evidence that I received from feedback demonstrated that the doctors involved were interested in supporting patients to develop their habits and felt that this would be worthwhile to develop further.
In October 2018, I started my Master’s in Research (MRes) in Computing and Future Interactive Technology working with Dr Stephen Lindsay and Dr Joss Whittle. We developed a discreet social communication aid using speaker recognition which worked on the Apple Watch, the recognition of an individual from vocal patterns to alert the user to who is speaking. We utilised a wavenet for feature extraction, tested both CatBoost and Random forests and reached a moderate accuracy algorithm (however since work using Apple CreateML we have achieved a significantly more accurate algorithm with 98% accuracy). We ran further studies with expert designers, people who find socialising difficult and people with Traumatic Brain Injury. We also ran studies to understand how delays in conversational aids affect conversation flow. As part of the MRes, we submitted a paper to CHI 2019 Workshop on Addressing the Challenges of Situationally-Induced Impairments and Disabilities in Mobile Interaction.
In October 2019, I began my PhD in investigating how people with a traumatic brain injury can develop their accessibility work through Maker Spaces and Participatory Design Workshops. In my first year of my PhD, I worked with Dr Kirsten Ellis from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia on the TapeBlocks project – EVA blocks wrapped in electronic conductive fabric tape with components mounted to them. Tapeblocks are developed as a learning aid for young people with intellectual disabilities (a legal term in Australia). We ran participatory design workshops with learning coaches to design teaching sessions followed by the learning coaches running further sessions with participants with intellectual disabilities using and creating Tapeblocks. The Tapeblocks project was presented at CHI 2021 and was subsequently published.
I have conducted research into the maker community during the COVID-19 pandemic and how many of the spaces operated and developed PPE. Recently I have also worked on research investigating the use of clay as a modality to develop models that are then scanned into CAD software. From this, I have been working on an iOS application that uses an image recognition algorithm to detect shapes and guesstimates the CAD model based on the parameters it sees during a 2D image.
Outside of my work, I am a keen road cyclist and during my time at Swansea University I was a member of the Road Cycling Team and became the Social Ride Captain responsible for organising social rides. I was also a member of the Rowing Team during my undergraduate years. A recent hobby of mine is photography with sports and night photography being my current interest.