Event
iSchool Research Colloquium: Lauren Wilcox, "Interactive Technology for Personal Health"
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
10:30 a.m.
2119 Hornbake Bldg, South Wing
University of Maryland iSchool Research Colloquium
Promoting Engagement with Personal Health through Interactive Technology
Lauren Wilcox
Columbia University
Abstract
The recent trend toward patient participation in their own healthcare has opened up numerous challenges and opportunities for informatics research. My research focuses on how technology can be designed to foster this participation-in particular, how user interfaces can be designed and developed to facilitate health-related information awareness and understanding. In this talk, I will provide an overview of my research on effective design and use of technology to inform lay people about aspects of their health status and health care. I will describe insights into human mental models and strategies for managing information and decisions, and new computational techniques to format and represent complex data types. I will also outline the design space for the emerging area of consumer-centered health informatics, and discuss opportunities for innovative interventions to support communication of multi-faceted health-related information to a variety of end users.
Biography
Lauren Wilcox is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Columbia University, advised by Professor Steven Feiner. Her research focuses on designing, building, and evaluating technology to support the needs of people working both individually and together to achieve health-related goals. In 2012, she was selected for a Dissertation Award from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Her dissertation builds upon a technical infrastructure that she developed with collaborators in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and focuses on the impact of a patient-centered information portal that provides hospital patients with access to timely health-related data and electronic note capture tools. Lauren received her BS and MS in Computer Science from Columbia University, and has worked as a Software Engineer at IBM, where she was recognized with an Early Tenure Inventor award. She is co-chair of the CHI 2013 workshop on Patient-Clinician Communication and co-chair for short papers and posters for Pervasive Health 2013.
Special note about the venue
The South Wing of Hornbake (the "classroom section") is separated internally from the library, and must be entered from the street side of the building (which directly faces campus drive). Room 2119 is easily reached by turning left when leaving the elevator on the second floor.
