Master of Science (MS), Wright State University, 2022, Computer Science

Promoting awareness of social determinants of health (SDoH) among healthcare providers is important to improve the patient care experience and outcome as it helps providers understand their patients in a better way which can facilitate more efficient and effective communication about health conditions. Healthcare professionals are typically educated about SDoH through lectures, questionaries, or role-play-based approaches; but in today's world, it is becoming increasingly possible to leverage modern technology to create more impactful and accessible tools for SDoH education. Wright LIFE (Lifelike Immersion for Equity) is a simulation-based training tool especially created for this purpose. It is a mobile app that would be available on both Google Play and Apple Store for easy access to the providers. This highly realistic, interactive, and captivating app is essential for creating mindfulness about SDoH and generating long-lasting compassion and empathy in health care workers for their real patients and helping them to build a good clinician-patient relationship. An important aspect of this simulation is the realism of the characters and their behavior. This thesis specifically focuses on the strategy and experience of designing and developing realistic human character models and animations so that the players connect naturally and deeply with the virtual characters. This contributes to the generation of a greater level of empathy in the providers and decreases the level of biases. In addition to its contribution to creating efficient design methodologies, this effort also resulted in a portfolio of high-quality, low-memory multi-modal avatars resembling diverse people of various ethnicities, ages, body types, and gender.

Committee: Yong Pei Ph.D. (Advisor); Paul J. Hershberger Ph.D. (Committee Member); Thomas Wischgoll Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science; Design; Educational Software; Health Care; Information Technology; Systems Design

Master of Science, University of Toledo, 2021, Chemical Engineering

Interactive textbooks generate big data through student reading participation, including animations, question sets, and auto-graded homework. Here, animations are multi-step, dynamic visuals with text captions where records of students' clicks confirm usage and view time. These multi-step animations divide new content into small chunks of information that engage the student, require attentiveness and interaction, and align with tenets of cognitive load theory. Animation usage data from an interactive textbook for a chemical engineering course in Material and Energy Balances (MEB) is studied. This thesis uses MEB zyBook data collected across five cohorts between 2016 and 2020. Two metrics capture animation usage: 1) fraction of students watching and re-watching animations, 2) length of animation views. In addition to variation across content, parsed by book chapter, five animation characterizations investigate student usage for different types of visuals (Concept, Derivation, Figures and Plots, Physical World, and Spreadsheets). In addition, pre- and post-surveys for one cohort in 2021 assessed students' attitudes about engineering and animations. The three important findings of the animation view data are 1) student animation usage is very close to or greater than 100% for all chapters, 2) median view time varies from 22 s for 2-step animations to 59 s for 6-step animations - a reasonable attention span for students' cognitive load, 3) Median watch time by characterization ranged from 40 s for Derivation to 20 s for Physical World. Finally, student attitudes about engineering and animations found small, positive shifts that were not statistically significant between pre and post surveys.

Committee: Matthew Liberatore (Advisor) Subjects: Adult Education; Chemical Engineering; Educational Technology