Category: Ethics

Dear Santa

Now that I’ve managed to clear away all of the stressful and/or boring stuff that was keeping me busy, time to do something fun: Christmas shopping! After the break my project is going to be almost halfway through, and although it will be a good while yet before I’m ready to start conducting user tests, it’s time to start getting serious about recruiting participants. After all, the tests are supposed to be about analysing the participants’ data, so they can’t just walk in at their convenience – I need them to spend some time collecting data first, and to do that, they’ll need something to collect the data with.

Our initial idea was to recruit people who are already using a sleep monitor of some kind, and I’m sure we’ll be able to find at least a few of those, but naturally we’ll have a bigger pool of candidates if we have a few devices available to loan to people who don’t have one of their own. Also, it’s obviously useful for me to play with these devices a bit so I can get a better idea of what sort of data they generate and what’s the best way to export it if I want to use it for my research (which I do). Besides, I’m hardly going to spend my entire expense budget on travel even if I go out of my way to pick the most remote conferences I can find to submit papers to.

So I didn’t need to worry too much about what I can afford – one of the many great things about the MSCA fellowship – but that doesn’t mean that the choice of what to buy was straightforward, because the range of consumer products capable of tracking sleep is, frankly, a little bewildering. Some devices you wear on your body, some you place in your bed and some at the bedside, and although I soon decided to narrow down my list of options by focusing on wearables, that still left me with more than enough variety to cope with. Some of these gadgets you wear on your wrist, while others go on your finger like a ring, and the wrist-worn ones range from basic fitness bracelets to high-end smartwatches that will probably make you your protein smoothie and launder your sports gear for you if you know how to use them.

One thing that made the decision quite a lot easier for me is that the manufacturers of fitness bracelets now helpfully include all of their sleep tracking functionality in models that are near the low end of the price spectrum, and since I’m only interested in sleep data, there was no need to ponder if I should go with the inexpensive ones or invest in bigger guns. Also, I had a preference for products that don’t make you jump through hoops if you want to export your data in a CSV file or similar, so I looked at the documentation for each of my candidates and if I couldn’t find a straight answer on how to do that, I moved on. In the end I settled on three different ones: the Fitbit Alta HR, the Withings Steel, and the Oura Ring.

What I particularly like about this trio is that each of these models represents a distinct style of design: the Fitbit is a modern bracelet-style gadget, whereas the Withings looks more like a classic analog wrist watch, and the Oura is, well, a ring. I can thus, to a certain extent, cater for my study participants’ individual stylistic preferences. For example, I’m rather partial toward analog watches myself, so I’d imagine that for someone like me the design of the Withings would have a lot of appeal.

Today’s my last day at work before the Christmas break, and things are wrapping up (no pun intended) very nicely. The orders for the sleep trackers went out last week, this morning I submitted the last of my (rather badly overdue) ethics deliverables to the European Commission, and just minutes ago I came back from my last performance with the DCU Campus Choir for this year. The only thing that may impinge on my rest and relaxation over the next couple of weeks is that there’s a conference deadline coming up immediately after my vacation and I’m quite eager to submit, but I shouldn’t need to worry about that until after New Year. Happy holidays, everyone!

Sleepytime

I recently obtained approval for my research from the DCU Research Ethics Committee, so I’m now officially good to go. This might seem like a rather late time to be getting the go-ahead, considering that I’ve been doing the research since February, but so far the work has been all about laying the foundations of the collaborative knowledge discovery software platform (for which I’m going to have to come up with a catchy name one of these days). This part of the project doesn’t involve any human participants or real-world personal data, so I’ve been able to proceed with it without having to concern myself with ethical issues.

As a matter of fact, if it were entirely up to me, the ethics application could have waited until even later, since it will be quite a while still before the platform is ready to be exposed to contact with reality. However, the Marie Curie fellowship came with T&Cs that call for ethics matters to be sorted out within a certain time frame, so that’s what I’ve had to roll with. I’d never actually had to put together an application like this before, so perhaps it was about time, and presumably it won’t hurt that some important decisions concerning what’s going to happen during the remainder of the project have now been made.

One of the big decisions I’d been putting off, but couldn’t anymore, was the nature of the scenario that I will use to demonstrate that the software platform is actually useful for the purpose for which it’s intended. This will be pretty much the last thing that happens in the project, and before that the software will have been tested in various other ways using, for example, open or synthetic data, but eventually it will be necessary to find some volunteers and have them try out the software so I can get some evidence on the workability of the software in a reasonable approximation of a real-world situation. It’s hardly the most controversial study ever, but it’s still research on human subjects and there will be processing of personal data involved, so things like research ethics and the GDPR come into play here and need to be duly addressed.

What I particularly needed a more precise idea about was the data that would be processed using the software platform. In the project proposal I said that this would be lifelogging data, but that can mean quite a few different things, so I needed to narrow it down to something specific. Of course it wouldn’t make sense to develop a platform for analysing just one specific kind of data, so as far as the design and implementation of the software is concerned, I have to pretend that the data could be anything. However, the only way I can realistically expect to be able to carry out a meaningful user test where the users actually bring their own data is by controlling the type of data they can bring.

There were a few criteria guiding the choice of the type of data to focus on. For one thing, the data had to be something that I knew to be already available at some sources accessible to me, so that I could run some experiments on my own before inflicting the software on others. Another consideration was the availability of in-house expertise at the Insight Centre: I’ve never done any serious data mining myself, having always looked at things from more of a software engineering perspective, so it was important that there would be someone close by who knows about the sort of data I intend to process and can help me ensure that the platform I’m building has the right tools for the job.

When I discussed this issue with my supervisor, he suggested sleep data – I’m guessing not least because it’s a personal interest of his, but it does certainly satisfy the above two criteria. Furthermore, it also satisfies a third one, which is no less important: there are many different devices in the market that are capable of tracking your sleep, and these are popular enough that it shouldn’t be a hopeless task to find a decent number of users to participate in testing the software. The concept of lifelogging if often associated with wearable cameras such as the Microsoft SenseCam, but these are much more of a niche product, making photographic data a not very attractive option – which it in fact was anyway because of the privacy implications of various things that may be captured in said photographs, so we kind of killed two birds with one stone there.

Capturing and analysing sleep data is something of a hot topic right now, so in terms of getting visibility for my research, I guess it won’t hurt to hop on the bandwagon, even though I’m not aiming to develop any new analysis techniques as such. Interestingly, the current technology leader in wearable sleep trackers hails from Oulu, Finland, the city where I lived and worked before joining Insight and moving to Dublin. There’s been quite a lot of media buzz around this gadget recently, from Prince Harry having been spotted wearing one on his Australian tour to Michael Dell announcing he’s decided to invest in the company that makes them. I haven’t personally contributed to the R&D behind the product in any way, but I feel a certain amount of hometown pride all the same – Nokia phones may have crashed and burned, but Oulu has bounced back and is probably a lot better off in the long run, not depending so heavily on a single employer anymore.