On Monday Aug 3 I learned of my summer boss’/advisor’s decision to discontinue his managerial position with the NLP project that is being led by Cynthia Farina of the Law School’s Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative. His decision made a significant dent on my plans for the 10 months. As of now, I am considering joining JP Pollak’s project, which is funded for years. More about this project below.
Mobile Phone-based Social Support for Cancer Patients
Funded by the NIH, this project aims to develop novel mobile phone-based applications that lead to socially supportive behaviors in cancer patients. Numerous studies have expounded on the benefits of social support for health, demonstrating improvements in overall quality of life, reductions in anxiety, reductions in perceived pain, increased comfort, and even faster recovery times. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to extensive social support networks or socially supportive therapy groups, and even those who do frequently don’t have access when they need it most, such as when sitting in a waiting room or lying in bed awake late at night. To that end, we have created Aurora, a mobile phone-based application that allows patients to quickly and easily share their current mood and emotions with one another. Patients select colors, photos, or designs that they feel represent their current emotional state, and can likewise view the current emotional state of their peers. Aurora supports a range of forms of communication designed to help each patient balance their own privacy with their desire for social interaction, and encourages them to reach out to one another in times of need or maintain distance as appropriate. This rich interaction, centered around the sharing of emotion, should help a greater number patients reap more of the benefits of quality social support. Further, the emotions each patient records in the system on a daily basis represent new and highly frequent data points that can be evaluated by care providers, and the monitoring of patient emotions on a daily basis could help stave off many potential problems before they arise fully.