My first time delving into the world of HCI research was my junior year when I enrolled in guided research and helped Nediyana Daskalova verify the validity of certain sleep trackers. We wanted to figure out which consumer-level sleep tracking device was closest to the “gold standard” of sleep tracking. I performed a casual research study comparing the accuracy of 10 different devices at once (yes, I wore them all to sleep, and consequently ruined my sleep quality) and wrote about it here. This project also involved some code to “reverse-engineer” as some of these devices/companies didn’t make it easy to retrieve your minute-by-minute data very easily. It was also my first time forking an open-source project from GitHub, which I used to create a custom and interactive data visualization for my sleep timelines across the devices.

This project helped Nedi how to code her own sleep tracking app for iOS which was used to publish the SleepBandits paper and, even later, her paper on tracking progress for self experiments, Self-E.