Investigating the Design & Deployment of Calmer

Postdoctoral Research with colleagues at the University of British Columbia (2019)

While I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia I also 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 design research community. The publication received a Best Paper award.

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

The citation and links of the article:
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. [Link] [PDF]