news from the center for information technology...

The so-called “observer effect” has well known

manifestations in IT, where watching a process output,

say, may slow it down, cause an I/O error, or otherwise

interfere. It is more famous though in particle physics

where simply peeking at an electron radically alters its

course.

A far more common example of the observer effect is

described in this issue of the CITRIS Signal’s first story,

“Smart Bandages to Track Wounds Through Healing”,

which covers upgrades to the most fundamental piece

Dear Friends of CITRIS,

of medical equipment: the bandage. Until

now, the same shield that kept a wound

safe also obscured possible infection or

other pathology from clinical observation.

Moreover, removing a bandage to see what

was happening beneath it too frequently

introduced new infections or aggravated

the wound. And for wounds buried deep in

the body after surgery, the medical costs of

observing it directly would be very high.

CITRIS engineers are addressing this

problem by printing flexible electronic

systems directly onto bandages that can

track the healing process without harming it.

Not only that, but the same subtle electrical

fields detected by the bandages could be

manipulated to speed and improve the

healing process itself. We’re not quite talking

about Star Trek Tricorders. But if they ever do

evolve, our devices will be their ancestors.

The nanotechnologies, printable electronics

processes, materials development, sensor

“Turning the Observer Effect on its Head”, Letter from Paul K. Wright and Camille Crittenden, Director and Deputy Director of CITRIS

A CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative project helps injured veterans navigate the cognitive obstacle course back to the voting booth.

An interdisciplinary team of UCB and UCSF researchers uses printable electronics to make bandages that can track—and potentially advance—the healing of wounds.

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NEWS FROMTHE CENTER FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH IN THE INTEREST OF SOCIETY

NOV/DEC 2013 ISSUE

T h e CITR IS SIGN A L

IN THIS ISSUE

T UR NING THE OB SER V ER EFFECT ON ITS HE A D

CITRIS-UC.ORG // CENTER FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH IN THE INTEREST OF SOCIETYUC BERKELEY • UC DAVIS • UC MERCED • UC SANTA CRUZ

2 The CITRIS Signal Nov/Dec 2013

deployment, wireless communication expertise,

and cooperative integration of all of these fields

make this project one that hits CITRIS’s sweet spot.

We will be thrilled to watch this one quicken.

CITRIS researchers are taking steps to accelerate

the healing and return to full public life of injured

combat veterans as well. Too many of these men

and women, so thoroughly engaged overseas,

avoid democratic participation at the ballot box

when they get home. Especially for those who have

received traumatic head injuries, the attendant

difficulties with attention and short-term

memory make voting a daunting and sometimes

overwhelming task. Data and Democracy Initiative

researchers are developing a new tablet-based

tool, Vote Your Mind, to help compensate for

these deficits and create a more reliable and user-

friendly experience in political participation.

CITRIS jump-starts innovation among affiliated

faculty by offering seed-grants for promising ideas

pursued by collaborative multi-campus teams.

Over the last five years we have distributed more

than $6 million to support ideas that have gone

on to win nearly $40 million in outside research

awards; a pretty impressive six-plus-fold return

on investment! Just as important, the competition

fuels the search for ways to address some of our

most pressing societal challenges. The seed-

grant program for 2014 will be announced soon,

so keep an eye on this website. The deadline for

submissions will be in late February. The smart

and out-of-the-box ideas we get each year from

our four campuses are not only inspiring, they

also are engines of hope. We can hardly wait to

see what creative ideas emerge this year in our

four focus areas: energy, health care, intelligent

infrastructure, and data and democracy.

Keep up the good work,

Paul Wright and Camille Crittenden

Paul K. WrightDirector, CITRIS Banatao Institute@CITRIS Berkeley

Camille CrittendenDeputy Director, CITRIS Banatao Institute@CITRIS Berkeley

VOTE YO UR MIND

photo credit: vox_efx (flickr.com)b y G o r d y S l a c k

A C I T R I S D a t a a n d D e m o c r a c y I n i t i a t i v e p r o j e c t h e l p s i n j u r e d v e t e r a n s n a v i g a t e t h e c o g n i t i v e o b s t a c l e c o u r s e b a c k t o t h e v o t i n g b o o t h .

SIGN UP FOR OUR E-NEWSLETTER AT CITRIS-UC.ORG OR FACEBOOK.COM/CITRIS

Nov/Dec 2013 The CITRIS Signal 3

Thousands of US veterans have suffered

traumatic brain injuries from roadside

bombs and mortar explosions in

Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of these injuries

are bloody—the results of shrapnel or bullets

penetrating the skull—while others are

invisible to the casual observer, the products

of shockwaves that move through the air after

an explosion and cause concussion. Both

kinds of traumatic brain injury (TBI) can be

disruptive and even disabling. Even when a

primary injury to the head appears to have

healed, vets commonly sustain short- or long-

term problems with organization, attention,

and memory.

Preparing to vote can be a daunting task

even for the most organized and attentive of

citizens. But for men and women with mild

cognitive impairment, such as veterans with

TBI, the task can be frustrating, leading voters

to quit before completing the whole ballot

or avoiding the process altogether. A new

tool being developed by CITRIS’s Data and

Democracy Initiative (DDI), Vote Your Mind,

aims to make voter guides, and hence the

ballot box itself, more accessible to individuals

with attention and memory disabilities.

Several smart-phone-based tools are designed

to aid vets with TBI; some help them remember

to take medications or keep appointments,

others help with communication, and still

others focus on rehabilitation, encouraging

the brain’s own plastic properties to stretch in

order to recover lost functions. But the tablet-

based Vote Your Mind will be the first devoted

specifically to making it easier for veterans—

or anyone with cognitive impairments—to

maintain their full civic participation by voting,

says Dan Gillette, the app’s co-developer and

a Visiting Researcher at DDI.

phot

o co

urte

sty

of w

ikip

edia

.org

CT scan showing cerebral contusions, hemorrhage within the hemispheres, subdural hematoma, and skull fractures. TBI can cause a host of physical, cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral effects, and outcome can range from complete recovery to permanent disability or death.



Supported by a grant from The Information

Technology and Information Foundation (ITIF),

Vote Your Mind will make voter guides more

accessible and useful to people suffering from

attention and memory problems so common after

a traumatic brain injury. The program breaks the

often arcane and densely organized voter guide

material into smaller, more easily grasped and

considered parts. It also allows users to interact

with material in ways that help sustain attention,

retain memory, and make decisions that reflect a

user’s opinions and values.

“We use a lot of feedback control loops,” says Greg

Niemeyer, the project’s principle investigator

and co-founder of DDI. “Propositions are often

complex, as are candidates’ reasons for running

for office. We do not want to oversimplify

them. But there should be extra effort put

into structuring them so that they become as

intelligible as possible. We’re not changing the

content. We’re just giving it a lot more and better

structure.”

Niemeyer recounts finding two bound and

printed documents in the mail one day—a Banana

Republic catalog and a voter guide. The clothing

catalog was “really compelling, transparent, and

almost irresistible,” he says. “The whole thing

is connected to contemporary media reality. I

wanted to open it, to peruse it, and then, maybe

too often, to buy something from it.” The Voter

Guide on the other hand is soporific; colorless,

dull, with huge impenetrable-looking blocks of

text. “The typesetting seems to follow arcane

rules that have not been reconsidered at all in

light of developments in media.”

“The idea of Vote Your Mind is to keep people

engaged by making the experience more

interesting and accessible,” says Faraz Farzin, a

developmental psychologist consulting on the

project. “If it is more engaging, users are likely

to spend more time on task, which usually

leads to greater comprehension and greater

understanding of the information.”

As users of Vote Your Mind read individual

paragraphs, they are prompted to mark each one

with one of three marks: a check, an exclamation

mark, or a question mark. The exact meaning

of these symbols is left to the user, but simply

interacting with the text helps users to remember

what they have read and makes it easier to

review, says Farzin, a long-time collaborator with

Niemeyer. Farzin earned her PhD at UC Davis

where she worked at the CITRIS Social Apps

Lab and the Center for Mind and Brain. She is

currently a research scientist at Lumosity.

In a systematic, evenly applied way, the software

will break down and simplify the way content

in the voter guide is presented, says Farzin. This

includes “chunking,” or breaking down headings

and body text, “making it come on line in a more

goal- and user-directed sequence so users can

read and advance to the next subject at their

own speed. Pacing is critical to keeping users

engaged and not frustrated,” she says.

Vote Your Mind also lets users annotate voter

guide text by selecting icons that represent

their opinions. At the end of each section,

this information is visualized to assist voters

in making up their mind or confirming their

decision about a candidate or issue.



The application also compiles a sample ballot,

recording choices as users move through it

making decisions about candidates, propositions,

and measures. The sample ballot can be printed

at the end of the process and be brought into the

voting booth.

For users with vision problems or difficulty

reading, the device will also use auditory

information and text-to-speech translation, says

Farzin.

For the project to succeed, it must appear—and

indeed be—politically neutral. That is a tricky

challenge, Gillette says, when even an aesthetic

preference might imply political associations. “We

are supporting the current electoral system,” says

Gillette, “not advocating for a different system or

advancing any kind of political agenda. We are

just trying to make voting your mind easier.”

Traditionally when it comes to voting, content

reigns supreme; any design is suspect. The state-

sponsored voter guide itself is not supposed to be

rhetorical. Rather, it should be a neutral crucible

in which charged political rhetoric can be safely

contained. But voter guides could be designed

in a way that makes pro and con arguments for

a measure equally transparent, Niemeyer says,

and that inspires people to vote. We want the

voter guide to remind people that as voters they

are very powerful. As they are now designed, the

guides makes a lot of people feel powerless, he

says.

The four-member Vote Your Mind research team,

which includes DDI Director Camille Crittenden,

will soon conduct a pilot study of the tablet

application with the help of a group of Berkeley

students, who are also vets who suffer from mild

cognitive impairment.

“Voting is an important symbolic step back into

society for many injured veterans,” says Gillette.

“If I can vote, it says a lot about my validity and

the validity of the group I belong to. That has

been true with race, disability, and citizenship.

And it’s true for injured vets.”

“These veterans have invested a lot in this

democracy already,” says Niemeyer. “When they

served they had the highest possible stakes in

the democratic system. We want to facilitate their

continued engagement at home.”

“

These veterans have invested a lot in this democracy already...when they served they had the highest possible stakes in the democratic system. We want to facilitate their continued engagement at home.“ - Greg Niemeyer, Faculty Co-director of Data and Democracy Initiative and

Associate Professor in Art Practice, CITRIS @ Berkeley “

Dan Gillette co-developed the Vote Your Mind project, which aims to make the voting process simpler for vets with brain injuries.



Most scrapes and boo-boos heal quickly

and completely with traditional, over-

the-counter bandages. However, for

deeper cuts or surgical incisions, something

more is needed so that physicians can monitor

the healing process happening underneath the

bandage. “Right now, if you have a bandaged

wound, the only way to tell its status is to remove

the bandage and look,” says Michael Maharbiz,

Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and

Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. Neglecting

to inspect wounds can allow infections and

other serious pathology to go undetected and

untreated. But removing a bandage may expose a

wound to infections, disrupt the healing process,

or structurally damage the wound itself.

Maharbiz is working with colleagues to develop

a bandage that reads electrical fields naturally

emitted by wounds to track the rate and extent of

healing. This new tool could potentially be applied

to internal surgical sites and sutures, tracking

internal healing and then wirelessly sending data

out of the body to an external processor. Currently,

there is no good way for doctors to track progress

of internal wounds so this bandage could be used

in numerous situations.

The project, called FRONTS (Flexible Resorbable

Organic Nanomaterial Therapeutic Systems) and

sponsored by the NSF, employs an interdisciplinary

group of researchers from UC Berkeley and UCSF,

to develop the bandage device. Maharbiz focuses

on the project’s nanosensors, but the group

also includes specialists in printed electronics,

biocompatible materials, surgical devices and

procedures, and the physiology of wound healing.

After an injury, epidermal cells replicate and

move into the area of a wound in order to close

it up and start the healing process. This causes

ionic concentrations to shift, a change that

generates subtle but characteristic electrical

fields. The fields are detectable by sensor arrays

that can be printed onto a flexible substrate that

is part of the bandage itself. UC Berkeley EECS

Professors Vivek Subramanian and Ana Claudia

Arias head the electronic printing efforts and can

SM A RT B A ND A GES TO TR A CK W O UNDS THR O U GH HE A LING

b y G o r d y S l a c k

A n i n t e r d i s c i p l i n a r y t e a m o f U C B a n d U C S F r e s e a r c h e r s u s e s p r i n t a b l e e l e c t r o n i c s t o m a k e b a n d a g e s t h a t c a n t r a c k — a n d p o t e n t i a l l y a d v a n c e — t h e h e a l i n g o f w o u n d s .



print circuits, sensors, and batteries on all kinds

of flexible materials, including biocompatible

ones that are “thin, light, flexible, and disposable,”

Subramanian says.

“To get data out of the wounds we need a thin-film

battery, we need electrodes to do measurements,

and, in the longer term, if we are going to put

this inside the body, we need electronics that will

dissolve away,” notes Subramanian.

It has long been known that wounds, when healing,

create signature electrical fields. “But no one has

done a good job of putting all of this information

together to build good models of wound healing,

and make those models tractable, make them

useful in the clinic,” says Maharbiz. The novel step

embodied in the FRONTS project is the detection

and precise measurement of those fields over

time, thereby non-invasively tracking the healing

process. Together with Maharbiz, Subramanian is

developing ways to automatically interpret and

analyze the electrical signals given off by wounds.

For simplicity’s sake, the first application for such

bandages would be on damaged tissue on the

outside of the body. “For on-skin measurements,”

says Subramanian, “the materials do not have to

dissolve; they are just thin-film printed systems

integrated into bandages.”

The on-skin concept is currently being tested on

animals models at the University of California in

San Francisco. Shuvo Roy, a UCSF professor in

bioengineering, and Michael Harrison, a pediatric

surgeon and professor emeritus also at UCSF, are

preparing for clinical human trials if the animal

models are successful. “We already have a clinic

and a practitioner in the plan so we can move

quickly to testing the bandages in the clinic,” says

Maharbiz.

The group is developing a more complex and

challenging version of the bandage as well.

It relies on the same principles, but this array

of sensors would be left inside the body after

surgery in order to track the healing progress of

internal lesions created during surgery. In those

cases, unless doctors reopen the surgical site, it

is impossible to track how fast and well a wound

is healing. The sensors themselves could be

embedded deep in the abdominal cavity at the

site of the wound but have a thin tail-like antenna

connecting them to a chip near the skin that

sends the data to a receiver outside the body.

The body tends to reject equipment left inside

it for very long, though, so the research group

is experimenting with non-toxic materials that

will biodegrade and be absorbed by the body.

Everything from the batteries to the circuit

boards must be biocompatible, non-toxic, and

resorbable, says Subramanian.

Professor Michel Maharbiz is developing smart bandages that read electrical fields to track wound healing.



Beyond just tracking the progress of healing

wounds, the group is hoping eventually to

influence that healing by the introduction and

manipulation of electrical fields. This part of the

project is “still pretty speculative,” says Maharbiz.

However, there is strong evidence, he says, that

wounds not only produce electrical fields, but

that whole communities of cells—particularly

epithelial cells—are also responsive to them.

The electrical disturbance to epithelial cells

created by a wound is immediate and is thought

to trigger a process known as galvanotaxis in

which cells proliferate and migrate to the site

of injury. By manipulating the electrical fields

around a wound, it may be possible to influence

how it heals, minimizing harmful scar tissue

and maximizing the chances for full and robust

recovery, says Maharbiz. “It would help doctors

gain control over how the healing takes place,

more than just making it go fast.”

Applying electrical fields is a much trickier

engineering and clinical problem than just

reading them, says Maharbiz, because these fields

may cause unintended electro-chemical side

effects (in addition to tissue healing) that doctors

would first have to understand and control for.

Roy is also investigating additional sensors that

could be made part of a bandage system to track

more kinds of information emitted by wounds:

pressure and oxygen sensors, for example, could

help detect the emergence of pressure ulcers,

a common problem for hospital patients who

remain in one position for a long time. With

the population getting older and assistive care

becoming ever more prominent, a device that can

assist with preventing ulcers in patients would be

very useful.

No one has done a good job of putting all of this information together to build good models of wound healing, and make those models tractable, make them useful in the clinic.“ - Michel Maharbiz, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and

Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley “



11/20 Policy Impact of TelemedicineJana Katz-Bell [UC Davis School of Medicine]Research Exchange Seminar Series, Health Care Initiative

This talk will explore these themes and the importance for on-going, multi-disciplinary engagement. Jana Katz-Bell will approach this topic not as a healthcare provider nor an engineer -- but as a person who has been involved in implementation of many telehealth applications over the past decade and from a policy and sustainability perspective. 12-1pm, Free with RegistrationBanatao AuditoriumSutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeleyhttp://citris.eventbrite.com

UPCOMING EVENTS

11/22 Automating Demand Response:From Hot Summer Events to Any TimeMary Ann Piette [LBNL]Research Exchange Seminar Series, i4Energy Initiative

Mary Ann Piette is the Head of the Building Technology and Urban Systems Department and has been at LBNL since 1983. She is also the Director of the Demand Response Research Center (DRRC). She develops and evaluates low-energy and demand response technologies for buildings and specializes in commissioning, energy information systems, benchmarking, and diagnostics. 12-1pm, Free with RegistrationBanatao AuditoriumSutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeleyhttp://citris.eventbrite.com

12/04 Community-Scale Renewable Energy MicrogridsMichael Isaacson [UC Santa Cruz]Research Exchange Seminar Series, i4Energy Initiative

Professor Isaacson is the principle investigator of the Sustainable Engineering and Ecological Design (SEED) research program at UCSC, which recently received a five-year $4.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to fund clean energy research and educational programs. 12-1pm, Free with RegistrationBanatao AuditoriumSutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeleyhttp://citris.eventbrite.com

Visit the CITRIS EventBrite page for events details and registration:http://citris.eventbrite.com

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THE CITRIS SIGNAL

CITRIS Editor, Yvette Subramanian

Contributing Writer, Gordy Slack

Design by Cheryl Martinez

[email protected]

gordyslack.blogspot.com

[email protected]

CITRIS’s mission, to “shorten the pipeline” between research innovations and their application to real-world problems, requires investment from a range of partners. We receive funding from the University of California, as well as corporations, foundations, and individuals committed to improving the lives of Californians and others around the world. If you would like to support our work in health care, energy, intelligent infrastructures, or data and democracy, please consider making a gift online or contact our Director of Finance, [email protected]. Thank you!

Please visit http://bit.ly/give2citris

You may make a gift to:CITRIS General Gifts Fund

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