Project EMAR

October 15, 2017

Project EMAR Year 2: Funding, an Award, and a New Team!

emar

So much has happened over the summer to move Project EMAR forward!

 

Big News! National Science Foundation Funding

In June, the team learned that the National Science Foundation awarded a $1.1 million National Robotics Initiative grant to fund further development of EMAR. The work is now supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant no. NRI-1734100. This grant will certainly help the team reach the goal of making EMAR a high-fidelity and fully functioning social robot able to gather stress and mood data, while reducing stress in teens!

 

An award winning paper!

More good news and recognition came  in August when Emma and Elin received a Best Paper Award at the ACM SIGDOC conference held in Halifax, Nova Scotia for their paper “Designing for Engagement: Using Participatory Design to Develop a Social Robot to Measure Teen Stress.” Go EMAR!!

Autumn Quarter 2017 DRG Team

The year ahead

And Best of all in September, another cross campus multi-disciplinary Directed Research Group (DRG) of amazing students from UW Tacoma and Seattle has converged to achieve the next goal of Project EMAR. Their mission is to develop and launch a high school social robot design challenge which will take place in March at UW. In order for us to better understand what the high-fidelity EMAR should looking, we’re engaging teens in co-design through a robot design challenge. We can’t wait to see what ideas Seattle and Tacoma area high school teams come up with in their designs.  

 

Three UW student teams are hard at work developing all of the educational materials for the design challenge.  

  • The video team is creating online video tutorials to teach the human-centered design process to high school students.
  • The website team is building a public website where high school students can access the tutorials to learn the methodology of human-centered design and to learn about UW’s high school social robot design challenge.
  • The social media team is working hard to start a Facebook page for Project EMAR as well as update the Project EMAR blog and Twitter feed.  We are all thinking of how to bring the high-fidelity EMAR to life!

 

This is going to be a very exciting year for Project EMAR. Stay tuned!

 

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