This is the server side repository for the web application used in the 2022 Human Computation Conference paper "Gesticulate for Health's Sake! Understanding the Trade-offs of Gestures as an Input Modality for Microtask Crowdsourcing".
Human input is pivotal in building reliable and robust artificial intelligence systems. By providing a means to gather diverse, high-quality, representative, and cost-effective human input on demand, microtask crowdsourcing marketplaces have thrived. Despite the unmistakable benefits available from online crowd work, the lack of health provisions and safeguards, along with existing work practices threatens the sustainability of this paradigm. Prior work has investigated worker engagement and mental health, yet no such investigations into the effects of crowd work on the physical health of workers have been undertaken. Crowd workers complete their work in various sub-optimal work environments, often using a conventional input modality of a mouse and keyboard. The repetitive nature of microtask crowdsourcing can lead to stress-related injuries, such as the well-documented carpal tunnel syndrome. It is known that stretching exercises can help reduce injuries and discomfort in office workers. Gestures, the act of using the body intentionally to affect the behavior of an intelligent system, can serve as both stretches and an alternative form of input for microtasks. To better understand the usefulness of the dual-purpose input modality of ergonomically-informed gestures across different crowdsourced microtasks, we carried out a controlled 2 x 3 between-subjects study (N=294). Considering the potential benefits of gestures as an input modality, our results suggest a real trade-off between worker accuracy in exchange for potential short to long-term health benefits.
If you wish to read the paper in full, you can find it here.
Crowdsourcing, Input Modality, Microtasks, Ergonomics, Worker Health
The data collected during this project, and the surveys used, can be found on the Open Science Framework here.
This project uses yarn to handle package installations. The version dependencies are tracked in the package.json file.
This project uses a MongoDB instance to manage state and record user events. Once you have a MongoDB instance running on your device, you will want to define a new database, and add a "users" collection within. MongoDB will require at least one collection to create a new database.
cd /data/db # try this if `mongod` doesn't start the server directly
mongodOnce you have a running MongoDB server, it is time to configure the environment variables needed for the project. The variables required are listed in the snippet below.
MONGO_URI=mongodb://localhost:27017/<databasename>
ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=
ACCESS_TOKEN_EXPIRATION=3h
REFRESH_TOKEN_SECRET=
REFRESH_TOKEN_EXPIRATION=30d
Replace <databasename> with the name of the database you created in MongoDB. The ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET and REFRESH_TOKEN_SECRET can be any value you wish, as they are used for password reset functionality of the password-jwt package. If you do not wish to set to any value, we recommend the string [REDACTED].
To start the developement server to get a live look at the project, run the following command:
yarn start:dev
The client-side implementation, which handles the capture and classification of the gestures, for this web application can be found in the healthbytes_hcomp_2022 repository.
If you use any portion of this repository in your academic work, please include the following citation.
@inproceedings{allen2022gesticulate,
title={Gesticulate for Health’s Sake! Understanding the Use of Gestures as an Input Modality for Microtask Crowdsourcing},
author={Allen, Garrett and Hu, Andrea and Gadiraju, Ujwal},
booktitle={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing},
volume={10},
number={1},
pages={14--26},
year={2022}
}
This project is licensed under the terms of the Apache-2.0 license.