New mobile apps and wearable devices for measuring health-related behavior and motivating health behavior change are being introduced by academia and industry at a dizzying rate. There are certainly some exciting opportunities in “just-in-time” behavioral measurement and intervention technologies enabled by these technologies. There are also, however, some major hurdles to overcome to prove that these new ideas lead to meaningful improvements in health.

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Sam Kass is a Chicago native and college athlete, played baseball for the University of Chicago, and graduated with a degree in U.S. history. In 2009, newly elected President Obama asked Kass to move from Chicago to the White House in order to continue his work as personal chef to the Obama family, an appointment Kass had held since January of 2006, as well as to work on food and nutrition policy.

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This live interaction via Skype is free and open to the public.

Over the last three years, Dr. BJ Fogg has used email to coach over 30,000 people in a new method of habit formation. This was not his intent at the start. However, as people signed up for his 5-day course each week, he just kept going, day after day, even while on vacation.

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Chronic stress is often thought to be exacerbated by interactive technologies–but we challenge this assumption by designing and evaluating techniques for designing experiences and interactions that either mitigate known stressors or induce calm. The outputs of this effort are both novel interactive systems and heuristics and frameworks for designers and researchers to reduce stressors in their designs. In this talk, Dr.

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This talk is free and open to the public, and will be a live interaction via Skype.

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This talk has been cancelled due to the weather, with plans to be rescheduled for spring 2015

This talk is part of the Advancing Wellness seminar series at the MIT Media Lab. For information about future talks, please signup to our mailing list by sending an email to wellness-seminars-join [at] media [dot] mit [dot] edu

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The Director’s Fellows program is a growing global network that connects the innovation and creativity of the MIT Media Lab with a broad array of leaders to catalyze creative thinking and concrete collaborations. Its goal is to expand the diversity, reach, and impact of the Media Lab and the Director’s Fellows themselves in deploying cutting-edge technology, ideas, and innovation to tackle key global challenges. It also helps to shape the perspectives and experience of stakeholders throughout the network, strengthening their capacity to serve and to lead.

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1/21, 2:30pm: Tod Machover and Paola Antonelli of MoMA, "Digital Creativity"

1/21, 8:00pm: Vocal Vibrations at the Music Industry Dinner

1/24, 5:45pm: Closing performance: "A Symphony for Our Times"

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This online workshop series is for educators, community center staff, and volunteers interested in engaging their young people and their families to become designers and inventors in their community. Family Creative Learning is a workshop series that engages children and their parents to learn together through the use of creative technologies. The workshops are designed to strengthen the social support and expertise of families with limited access to resources and experiences around computing.

This is a series of four, one-hour workshops:
January 21: Imagining your FCL

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