Designing and Evaluating Calmer, a Device for Simulating Maternal Skin-to-Skin Holding for Premature Infants

While I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia I had the pleasure to work with Liisa Holsti and Karon MacLean as well as other project collaborators on the project Calmer. Calmer is a technology that simulates key aspects of maternal skin-to-skin holding for prematurely born infants. Developing Calmer has been a 10-year project by several researchers and clinicians; and it is an ongoing project. While I came in late, my work was about objectively discovering and describing what this 10-year design process and the deployment studies entailed including its inspiration, approach, physical design, and introduction into the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. I lead this discovery research exercise (through several interviews, conversations, and reviewing all materials) and as a result also lead the writing of an article for a top-tier publication aimed for the HCI design research community. The article even received a best paper award for being among the top 1% of submissions to the CHI 2020 conference.

The paper can be viewed here: [Link] [PDF].

The citation: Hauser, S., Suto, M.J., Holsti, L., Ranger, M., & MacLean, K.E., (2020). Designing and Evaluating Calmer, a Device for Simulating Maternal Skin-to-Skin Holding for Premature Infants. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’20). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 201, 13 pages. 

There is also a project website and a news video about Calmer.