NSF Award
1814628
Recent years are seeing a sharp increase in the availability of personal and environmental 'omic' data about genomes or microbiomes to non-experts. Popular omic testing services produce data about people's personal genome, about their microbiome, and about plants and organisms in their living environment. As a result, people with no formal education in the life sciences can get access to their omic data by sending a self-collected sample to a direct-to-consumer testing provider, and results are delivered online. These people then need to interpret large amounts of complex data involving sensitive issues such as disease risk, carrier status, and potentially meaningful correlations with health and physical traits. While personal omics promise advances in health, for example through precision medicine, the slew of potential findings and the rapidly evolving interpretations these approaches produce are difficult to communicate to most non-experts. This project aims to empower people to explore, share, curate and better understand such data, which in turn can make substantial impact on their wellbeing. The project will identify user needs and develop novel human-computer interfaces to help people make sense of personal, social, and environmental omic data. These tools will be evaluated in a longitudinal study in real households, both validating the work and providing direct impact on participants' understanding of the data and their wellbeing. The tools will also be available through Open Humans, an open platform that brings together researchers, citizen scientists, and members of the public who share their personal omic data. In addition, the project will increase omic literacy among non-experts and contribute to increasing the participation of women and other underrepresented minorities in STEM research.<br/><br/>The project will conduct research on human-computer interaction for UbiqOmic environments: living spaces and social interactions where omic data is available about people, plants, animals, and surfaces. In particular, the team will identify user needs and develop web-based visual tools that integrate omic data sets from heterogeneous resources and multiple samples. These tools will allow users to aggregate, explore, relate, and connect pervasive omic information, and facilitate collaborative sense making of omic information within various social contexts including families and cohabiting communities. In addition, the project will harness the power of augmented reality (AR) to visualize the invisible, designing, developing, and evaluating an AR interface which overlays timely and actionable omic data in the environment and on the user's own body (oral, gut, skin). The team will evaluate these tools with both general audiences and early adopters through a series of usability and longitudinal studies. The project will advance the fields of human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, and personal informatics.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
