Current Work

Movement qualities and body perception during Ballet Practice (Dissertation):

Movement qualities are crucial and commonly used in ballet; their practice allows the expressiveness of the movement and the development of certain physical skills like balance, coordination, flexibility, and muscle strength. However, ballet dancers suffer from concerns related to their body image perception. A negative body image perception can cause negative feelings defined as Body Image Concerns (BIC) which are commonly related to aspects of physical appearance (e.g. height, shape, and complexion), and can also involve aspects of physical abilities (e.g. force, flexibility, coordination) that the body may have. 

These concerns are triggered mainly by the use of the mirror used during ballet classes and can evolve into health disorders such as Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) or even Eating Disorders (ED).To address this issue, we defined the general objective of this work. "To assess whether interactive sonification of movement qualities can alter the body image concerns of young ballet learners."

Digital Habits

By harnessing computational modeling and data-driven techniques, we can use such data to uncover technology use habits and behaviors, and ultimately explore their impact on a wide range of interdisciplinary outcomes including establishing a scientific basis to distinguish harmful from productive phone usage to limit the harm caused by phone distractions, while exploiting the potential of phones to improve learning. This project in collaboration with the Digital Mental Health Group (Cambridge, UK) aims to distinguish between habitual and non-habitual phone users based on their mobile-touch interaction patterns immediately after unlocking their phones.

We developed a real-time mobile Android app called 'iTACO' to capture user gestures (e.g., tap, swipe, scroll, and drag), track their interactions with various apps, and record the components within these apps.

Zens

The manipulation of sound characteristics can alter body perception. However, it is unclear whether pitch variations can alter flexibility perception. There is an untapped potential to understand how to sonify movements in a naturalistic scenario where body perception plays a crucial role, like practicing a physical activity, e.g., Yoga.

We followed a design and developed Zens, a sonified movement-based interface that uses sounds from the ocean to sonify Yoga movements and allows altering the pitch of such sounds.

Publications

• Valdez, C., Alvarez-Molina, K., Castro, L. A., & Tentori, M. (2023). Zens: Designing and evaluating a movement sonification interface to alter body and flexibility perception in Yoga. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 103084.

• Valdez C., Alvarez-Molina, K., Castro, L. A., & Tentori, M. (2023). The Doppler Effect: Altering Pitch to Materialize Movement Direction in Yoga. In Adjunct Proceedings of the  Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’23).

• Macias, A., Ramos, J., Valdez, C. et al. Mobile monitoring parents’ behaviors for supporting self-management in children with disabilities. J Ambient Intell Human Comput (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-019-01293-3