Research Statement
My research focuses on designing technologies to support the health and wellbeing of vulnerable individuals. Through this, it is my goal to create technologies that offer new opportunities, improve accessibility, and bridge many existing barriers to health resources. Within this space, I have conducted in-depth studies of existing and emerging technology use, including financial technologies, social media and smart speakers. Based on this, I have leveraged the opportunities and challenges these technologies provide to inform new system design in better alignment with the needs of unique user groups, such as individuals with bipolar disorder, essential workers, and deaf and hard of hearing users. My overall body of research is situated within the HCI, CSCW, and health informatics communities, while also advancing the eHealth domain. My work aims to establish a deep understanding of user's lived experiences conducting qualitative interviews and participatory design sessions. My research also leverages quantitative approaches including large-scale surveys and statistical data analysis.
Throughout my PhD I have conducted multidisciplinary work, including multiple project collaborations within psychiatry, communications, and media studies. This work has resulted in publications in top journals and conferences, such as CHI, UbiComp, PervasiveHealth, AMIA, Frontiers, and JMIR. Additionally, the findings of my research have gained interest outside of academia. For example, I delivered a keynote speech at the National Educational Conference organized by the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association (CHHA) to discuss my work on accessibility.
My most recent work has focused on the experience of those living with BD and technology-based interventions for symptom management. Through in-depth interviews, I have indexed the range of online behaviors characteristic of manic and depressive mood episodes for the future development of a system to infer and provide early warning of these mood episode onsets. Most notably, financial decisions, such as impulsive online shopping, was a leading characteristic of manic mood episodes and a significant drop in overall engagement with technology was characteristic of depressive mood episodes.
Through this work, I also highlighted key opportunities for technological intervention, grounded in patients’ lived experiences. This provided insight for future financial interventions, as well as improving communication within their social networks, both online and in-person. Regarding their social support networks, patients wanted a system to provide context or a disclaimer to explain negative or out-of-character interactions during their mood episodes, help them communicate their needs to care partners, and provide care partners with actionable feedback to help.
Furthermore, I have focused on their acceptance and potential concerns with using behavioral data to infer their mood and intervene on specific symptomatic behaviors. Given the amount of data needed to provide useful BD feedback, individuals balance privacy tradeoffs, but overwhelmingly decide that their support needs outweighed their data concerns. Users displayed differing levels of comfort with handing over decision-making agency to a system or care partners and wanted clearly defined constraints and expectations regarding their privacy and agency. Patients also stressed the importance of their patient-clinician relationship and showed concern for increasing clinician burden and a blurring of work-life balance. However, they strongly believed that their online data could be used as a communication tool in and out of sessions to improve care and allow them to take on a more active, engaged role in their care .
Due to the heavy focus on online spending and the potential financial burdens to users in the initial study, I choose to narrow in on financial wellbeing using a case study, large-scale international survey, and a prototype evaluation study with BD patients and care partners. Based on an N=1 case study comparing financial records against past symptomatic periods, I published work that establishes a methodological approach to using financial data to understand mood episodes, as well as the prioritization of privacy, agency, and ethical concerns in the future development of financial interventions.
Through a large-scale international survey (N=480), I have further established the need for financial intervention technology, the existing financial and technological environment of individuals with BD and users’ openness to these types of interventions. Additionally, this work gathered further insight on how existing technologies can affect, or even promote, impulsive spending by design, users’ current practices to prevent this, and their attitudes towards involving their care partners to help support their financial decisions. The prototype study will follow up on and further ground these survey findings but move beyond BD patients and also address the unique needs care partners have in supporting those with BD on their finances or their broad day-to-day care.
My focus on individual well-being also looked to online spaces to understand how users adopt online spaces to log their experiences to build supportive communities. By analyzing the type of depression and anxiety tagged content users post to Instagram, I documented the categories of content shared along with the pros and cons to using public online spaces to disclose mental health experiences. While these created environments allow users to connect with similar others, these spaces are often co-opted for problematic uses such as pro-self-harm and eating disorder content, which can negatively impact users seeking positive support. Through this work, I put forth design suggestions to help protect users against these negative experiences and reinforce the positive outcome of online support.
Throughout the course of my research, I developed a strong desire to amplify the voices of underrepresented populations and users who are traditionally overlooked within technological spaces. While emerging technologies can improve accessibility for previously underrepresented groups, some users may still be systematically left out of those opportunities by design. Driven by this issue, I examined the use of smart assistants and home speakers by those who are deaf or hard of hearing. Through this work, I documented that there is a high demand for the use of these devices by deaf and hard of hearing users, despite the significant challenges these technologies presented for them on a consistent basis. Users often struggled with the higher pitch and tone of device default voices and wished to tailor them to their unique and changing hearing ranges. Unlike other users, receiving a verbal response from the device was not always their main goal. Instead, they were more interested in using a voice interface to perform tasks, such as turn on lights, or prompt screen-based feedback, like asking for directions while driving. Through this work, I put forth design recommendations to better serve these user populations, such as increased customization based on audiogram mapping and more informative visual feedback, some of which have since been implemented in recent updates to these voice assistant systems.
Following this work, I examined how more niche communities may use social media to support their well-being, specifically how essential workers used Twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic. When compared to a sample of average Twitter users, those who self-disclosed as essential workers showed different usage patterns that could indicate increased mental health concerns, based on previous work, such as more frequent and late-night use. Though mental health keywords were more frequent, their more positive overall sentiment could suggest that they use Twitter as a supportive community space for venting or sharing their collective experience.
While my dissertation work focuses on serious mental illness, I have also conducted HCD research related to health and wellbeing, more broadly. In my earlier work, I examined how technologies can be used to help prompt self-reflection to improve personal, individual well-being. In particular, I tested how different framing placed on photo-based nutritional tracking could be used to prompt user reflection on how they make food choices. By asking users to photograph either their most or least healthy meal of the day, users became more cognizant of what qualities define their definition of “healthy” and allowed them to take a more holistic approach to meal tracking, rather than fixating on calories. Additionally, this work highlighted inclusivity issues with existing meal tracking systems that are largely catered to western meal practices and do not accommodate more communal eating experiences characteristic to other cultural practices.
In future work, I will expand on my expertise in technology design and development, smart speaker voice interfaces, and rethink financial technologies in the context of both mental health and general wellbeing. I also intend to promote more inclusive design by involving underrepresented groups in future research efforts.
Initially, to expand on my dissertation work, I mean to further develop tech-based solutions to support the communication needs between those with BD and their care partners, as well as provide in-situ message sentiment feedback in online spaces to help prevent negative social interactions commonly reported by research participants. The body of my work thus far has focused on bipolar disorder as a specific scenario to understand the manifestation of symptomatic behaviors in online spaces and how we can channel that online data to help users better learn about their own unique situations. However, each condition is uniquely different---both regarding what online data markers are important and the level of comfort different user groups may have with using their personal data for this purpose. Therefore, I would like to expand this work to other mental health concerns and build out a more robust set of tools for individuals to help take charge of their mental healthcare based on their personal data.
I also intend to focus on rising issues such as anxiety and college age populations, especially in regard to money-related stress and financial decision making. I believe this avenue of study would provide additional opportunities for me to continue working with undergraduate students and promote getting involved and conducting research.
Furthermore, I mean to extend my previous work to other underrepresented groups, additional accessibility concerns, and address differential access and health stigmatization in rural populations. I believe developing accessible resources are key for addressing a growing demand for healthcare for mental health or general well-being, especially for those with limited access to traditional care due to financial and regional barriers. To continue exploring the nuance of digital mental health interventions, I also plan to address the unique needs and challenges of well-being and mental health in rural communities who face additional physical access and social stigma barriers to needed support.
Through a mix of in-depth qualitative inquiry and large scale data analysis, my research has helped inform the design of more inclusive technologies to support overall wellbeing. Moving forward, I mean to continue building out the HCI community’s understanding of the highly nuanced needs of niche user groups and how this expanded support can make future tools more widely accessible to all users.
Throughout my PhD I have conducted multidisciplinary work, including multiple project collaborations within psychiatry, communications, and media studies. This work has resulted in publications in top journals and conferences, such as CHI, UbiComp, PervasiveHealth, AMIA, Frontiers, and JMIR. Additionally, the findings of my research have gained interest outside of academia. For example, I delivered a keynote speech at the National Educational Conference organized by the Canadian Hard of Hearing Association (CHHA) to discuss my work on accessibility.
My most recent work has focused on the experience of those living with BD and technology-based interventions for symptom management. Through in-depth interviews, I have indexed the range of online behaviors characteristic of manic and depressive mood episodes for the future development of a system to infer and provide early warning of these mood episode onsets. Most notably, financial decisions, such as impulsive online shopping, was a leading characteristic of manic mood episodes and a significant drop in overall engagement with technology was characteristic of depressive mood episodes.
Through this work, I also highlighted key opportunities for technological intervention, grounded in patients’ lived experiences. This provided insight for future financial interventions, as well as improving communication within their social networks, both online and in-person. Regarding their social support networks, patients wanted a system to provide context or a disclaimer to explain negative or out-of-character interactions during their mood episodes, help them communicate their needs to care partners, and provide care partners with actionable feedback to help.
Furthermore, I have focused on their acceptance and potential concerns with using behavioral data to infer their mood and intervene on specific symptomatic behaviors. Given the amount of data needed to provide useful BD feedback, individuals balance privacy tradeoffs, but overwhelmingly decide that their support needs outweighed their data concerns. Users displayed differing levels of comfort with handing over decision-making agency to a system or care partners and wanted clearly defined constraints and expectations regarding their privacy and agency. Patients also stressed the importance of their patient-clinician relationship and showed concern for increasing clinician burden and a blurring of work-life balance. However, they strongly believed that their online data could be used as a communication tool in and out of sessions to improve care and allow them to take on a more active, engaged role in their care .
Due to the heavy focus on online spending and the potential financial burdens to users in the initial study, I choose to narrow in on financial wellbeing using a case study, large-scale international survey, and a prototype evaluation study with BD patients and care partners. Based on an N=1 case study comparing financial records against past symptomatic periods, I published work that establishes a methodological approach to using financial data to understand mood episodes, as well as the prioritization of privacy, agency, and ethical concerns in the future development of financial interventions.
Through a large-scale international survey (N=480), I have further established the need for financial intervention technology, the existing financial and technological environment of individuals with BD and users’ openness to these types of interventions. Additionally, this work gathered further insight on how existing technologies can affect, or even promote, impulsive spending by design, users’ current practices to prevent this, and their attitudes towards involving their care partners to help support their financial decisions. The prototype study will follow up on and further ground these survey findings but move beyond BD patients and also address the unique needs care partners have in supporting those with BD on their finances or their broad day-to-day care.
My focus on individual well-being also looked to online spaces to understand how users adopt online spaces to log their experiences to build supportive communities. By analyzing the type of depression and anxiety tagged content users post to Instagram, I documented the categories of content shared along with the pros and cons to using public online spaces to disclose mental health experiences. While these created environments allow users to connect with similar others, these spaces are often co-opted for problematic uses such as pro-self-harm and eating disorder content, which can negatively impact users seeking positive support. Through this work, I put forth design suggestions to help protect users against these negative experiences and reinforce the positive outcome of online support.
Throughout the course of my research, I developed a strong desire to amplify the voices of underrepresented populations and users who are traditionally overlooked within technological spaces. While emerging technologies can improve accessibility for previously underrepresented groups, some users may still be systematically left out of those opportunities by design. Driven by this issue, I examined the use of smart assistants and home speakers by those who are deaf or hard of hearing. Through this work, I documented that there is a high demand for the use of these devices by deaf and hard of hearing users, despite the significant challenges these technologies presented for them on a consistent basis. Users often struggled with the higher pitch and tone of device default voices and wished to tailor them to their unique and changing hearing ranges. Unlike other users, receiving a verbal response from the device was not always their main goal. Instead, they were more interested in using a voice interface to perform tasks, such as turn on lights, or prompt screen-based feedback, like asking for directions while driving. Through this work, I put forth design recommendations to better serve these user populations, such as increased customization based on audiogram mapping and more informative visual feedback, some of which have since been implemented in recent updates to these voice assistant systems.
Following this work, I examined how more niche communities may use social media to support their well-being, specifically how essential workers used Twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic. When compared to a sample of average Twitter users, those who self-disclosed as essential workers showed different usage patterns that could indicate increased mental health concerns, based on previous work, such as more frequent and late-night use. Though mental health keywords were more frequent, their more positive overall sentiment could suggest that they use Twitter as a supportive community space for venting or sharing their collective experience.
While my dissertation work focuses on serious mental illness, I have also conducted HCD research related to health and wellbeing, more broadly. In my earlier work, I examined how technologies can be used to help prompt self-reflection to improve personal, individual well-being. In particular, I tested how different framing placed on photo-based nutritional tracking could be used to prompt user reflection on how they make food choices. By asking users to photograph either their most or least healthy meal of the day, users became more cognizant of what qualities define their definition of “healthy” and allowed them to take a more holistic approach to meal tracking, rather than fixating on calories. Additionally, this work highlighted inclusivity issues with existing meal tracking systems that are largely catered to western meal practices and do not accommodate more communal eating experiences characteristic to other cultural practices.
In future work, I will expand on my expertise in technology design and development, smart speaker voice interfaces, and rethink financial technologies in the context of both mental health and general wellbeing. I also intend to promote more inclusive design by involving underrepresented groups in future research efforts.
Initially, to expand on my dissertation work, I mean to further develop tech-based solutions to support the communication needs between those with BD and their care partners, as well as provide in-situ message sentiment feedback in online spaces to help prevent negative social interactions commonly reported by research participants. The body of my work thus far has focused on bipolar disorder as a specific scenario to understand the manifestation of symptomatic behaviors in online spaces and how we can channel that online data to help users better learn about their own unique situations. However, each condition is uniquely different---both regarding what online data markers are important and the level of comfort different user groups may have with using their personal data for this purpose. Therefore, I would like to expand this work to other mental health concerns and build out a more robust set of tools for individuals to help take charge of their mental healthcare based on their personal data.
I also intend to focus on rising issues such as anxiety and college age populations, especially in regard to money-related stress and financial decision making. I believe this avenue of study would provide additional opportunities for me to continue working with undergraduate students and promote getting involved and conducting research.
Furthermore, I mean to extend my previous work to other underrepresented groups, additional accessibility concerns, and address differential access and health stigmatization in rural populations. I believe developing accessible resources are key for addressing a growing demand for healthcare for mental health or general well-being, especially for those with limited access to traditional care due to financial and regional barriers. To continue exploring the nuance of digital mental health interventions, I also plan to address the unique needs and challenges of well-being and mental health in rural communities who face additional physical access and social stigma barriers to needed support.
Through a mix of in-depth qualitative inquiry and large scale data analysis, my research has helped inform the design of more inclusive technologies to support overall wellbeing. Moving forward, I mean to continue building out the HCI community’s understanding of the highly nuanced needs of niche user groups and how this expanded support can make future tools more widely accessible to all users.