Background Anxiety and depressive disorders are the most common mental health conditions among African American women. Despite the need for mental health care, African American women significantly underuse mental health services. Previous mobile health studies revealed significant improvements in anxiety or depressive symptoms after intervention. The use of mobile apps offers the potential to eliminate or mitigate barriers for African American women who are seeking access to mental health services and resources. Objective This study aims to evaluate the usability of the prototype of an app that is designed for supporting the self-management of anxiety and depression in African American women. Methods Individual usability testing sessions were conducted with 15 participants in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Cognitive walkthrough and think-aloud protocols were used to evaluate the user interface. Eye-tracking glasses were used to record participants’ visual focus and gaze path as they performed the tasks. The Questionnaire for User Interface Satisfaction was administered after each session to assess the participants’ acceptance of the app. Results Participants rated the usability of the prototype positively and provided recommendations for improvement. The average of the mean scores for usability assessments (ie, overall reactions to the software, screen, terminology and app information, learning, and app capabilities) ranged from 7.2 to 8.8 on a scale of 0-9 (low to high rating) for user tasks. Most participants were able to complete each task with limited or no assistance. Design recommendations included improving the user interface by adding graphics and color, adding a tutorial for first-time users, curating a list of Black women therapists within the app, adding details about tracking anxiety and depression in the checkup graphs, informing users that they can use the talk-to-text feature for journal entries to reduce burden, relabeling the mental health information icon, monitoring for crisis support, and improving clickthrough sequencing. Conclusions This study provides a better understanding of user experience with an app tailored to support the management of anxiety and depression for African American women, which is an underserved group. As African American women have high rates of smartphone ownership, there is a great opportunity to use mobile technology to provide access to needed mental health services and resources. Future work will include incorporating feedback from usability testing and focus group sessions to refine and develop the app further. The updated app will undergo iterative usability testing before launching the pilot study to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of the prototype.
A thermal emitter using a metasurface to tailor the emission spectrum in the mid-infrared for gassensing applications is demonstrated. The design consists of an array of high index dielectric elliptical pucks above a metal back-reflector. Using full-wave simulations in HFSS (Ver. 19.0.0), it has been shown that the achievable Q-factor (Q ≈ 150) in this structure is an order of magnitude larger than in plasmonic arrays (Q ≈ 16), attributed to the low-loss in the dielectric materials. Furthermore, the thermal emission properties of the structure can be engineered by manipulating Accomplishment of my thesis would not have been possible without the support of a few special people. I would like to acknowledge and thank my thesis supervisors Dr. Niall Tait and Dr. Shulabh Gupta from the bottom of my heart for providing consistent support and encouragement to complete this task. Specially going through and fixing the multiple drafts of my thesis and help with the journal papers. This project involved a lot of nanofabrication which is time consuming and requires a lot of expertise in terms of equipment usage and experience. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Robert Vandusen, Angela M. Williams and Rodney Aiton for their continuous support during fabrication failures and encouragement and appreciation on my successes. I would like to specially thank Nagui Mikhail for helping me specially when it came to simulation and technical support related to my project. Thanks to the Department of Electronics Engineering, particularly Nagui Mikhail, Blazenka Power, Anna Lee and Valerie Daley for their help. I would like to extend gratitude to my close friend Muhammad Asif for being my continuous support during this project. His words of encouragement and advises throughout my stay in Ottawa helped me navigate the highs and lows of my academic journey. I would also like to thank my dear friend Raheel Ahmed for his help and support towards the completion of my project. I would specifically like to acknowledge his mastery on graphical designing software that helped me in translating my fabricated devices into figures. My deepest thanks goes to my family for being my continuous support in this journey. My Wife, Naureen Aqueel was always there to help me specially raising our two sons Muhammad Abdurrahman Ali and Muhammad Yasir Ali while I was working late hours at Carleton University working on my projects and writing my thesis. She was my constant support and encouragement and believed in me for successful completion of my project.
A simple all-dielectric thermal emitter unit cell for narrowband gas-sensing application is proposed, providing large Q-factors compared to its plasmonic counterpart. It consists of a high-index dielectric-based elliptical puck on top of a back-reflector, providing narrowband thermal emission. Using full-wave simulations, it is demonstrated that the achievable Q-factors in this structure are orders of magnitude larger than what have been shown for plasmonic cells, thanks to their low-loss electrical characteristics. Furthermore, the thermal emission properties can be engineered by manipulating the geometry of the unit cell, whereby it is shown that these unit cells can provide polarized thermal emission simultaneously in two separate frequency bands, with identical Q-factor characteristics, depending on their ellipticity parameter.
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