Phone:

317-278-2938

Email:

rscomer@iu.edu

Campus:

IU Indianapolis

Education

• M.S. Media Arts and Science, Indiana University
• B.S. Art Education, Vanderbilt University
  
  

Biography

In addition to his expertise in multimedia applications, Robert Skipworth (Skip) Comer has had careers as a commercial photographer, photo educator, and user interface designer. A lecturer and research associate in the Media Arts and Science program, he continues to consult privately in the development of commercial interface designs.

Comer is coordinator for the COMET (COnvergent Media and Exploratory Technology) Lab.  The COMET Lab is a part of the Human-Centered Computing Department, and develops projects of various types, including application development, UI/UX design, and website development, using teams of undergraduate and graduate students.

He’s involved with several research projects connected to IU’s School of Medicine and School of Nursing, and the Regenstrief Institute, collaborating with researchers to develop technical solutions for their research questions.  His work involves developing websites, databases, and other interactive media to help researchers study patient education, symptom management, cancer screening, and other issues.

Recent projects include:

• Workforce Development Project (Robin Newhouse, Ph.D., R.N., FAAN)  A resource for emergency department personnel who need to refer substance abuse patients to recovery programs.
• LungTalk (Lisa Carter-Harris, Ph.D., AP R.N.)   An interactive patient education project, designed to help qualifying current and former smokers have informed discussions with their physicians about lung scan screening for lung cancer.
• Power of Prevention (Elecktra Paskett, Ph.D.; Victoria Champion, Ph.D., R.N., FAAN)   An interactive DVD used as part of a study to test the most effective methods of encouraging rural women to get regular cancer screenings.
• WISER (Claire Draucker, Ph.D., R.N., FAAN; Donna Martsolf, Ph.D., R.N., FAAN)   Writing to Improve Self in Relationships (WISER) is designed to be a web-based therapeutic writing intervention for young adults suffering from abusive dating relationships.  The project uses streaming video to present case studies about dating relationships, and links the main project to a REDCap database for secure HIPAA-compliant uploads of participant writing assignments.
• Explore IUPUI (Edgar Huang, Ph.D.)  This interactive virtual reality project allows users to explore a virtual model of the IU Indianapolis campus, featuring a time-based user interface for viewing the campus as it existed in the past, along with archived news stories and photos from the archives.
  
  

Research Interests

• Web application development topics, including PHP, HTML and Javascript frameworks, AJAX strategies, and application container methods
• Methods for managing protected health information (PHI) with full-featured web applications, using low-cost database strategies, such as REDCap API
• Geolocation and database-driven augmented reality methods