Designing User-Centric Health Technologies: A Team Science Challenge in Health-Computing Collaborations

Monday, August 28, 2023

Elena Agapie, PhD
Assistant Professor in Informatics
University of California, Irvine

About the Webinar:

Pursuing healthy behaviors is a complex, long-term process that is difficult to maintain. Many technologies promise to support people in pursuing health goals, yet many such technologies fail to account for people’s everyday needs or incorporate evidence-based strategies. Through Human/User Centered Design (HCD) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers and practitioners have developed methods to create technologies that meet people’s needs. However, incorporating design methodology in the lifecycle of creating health technologies is still difficult. In this talk, I present findings from an empirical study on the challenges that researchers encounter in designing technologies that use health evidence-driven techniques and account for people’s everyday life. I use a Team Science lens to describe the needs that Health and Computing researchers have in engaging in transdisciplinary work, forming cross-disciplinary teams, conceptualizing, and executing research that involves a design process. I wrap up by providing Team Science driven recommendations to better support the use of design in Health and Computing research collaborations.

About Elena Agapie:

Elena Agapie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She studies, designs, and builds technology to support people in pursuing positive health behaviors by drawing on people’s everyday experiences and evidence-based interventions in domains such as mental health and physical activity. Agapie’s work has been published and received awards in top HCI venues including CHI, CSCW, and HCOMP. She received her Ph.D. in Human Centered Design and Engineering from the University of Washington, and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Harvard University. Agapie worked on research projects in industry research labs including Microsoft Research, Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Research Lab, Intel, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. More about Elena Agapie.