Abstract

Engineers and computer scientists are increasingly faced with philosophical questions asked during the first industrial revolution. Such questions come to the fore when we build health technologies, or use NLP in different contexts. Taking them into account is becoming an essential part of our work. Among the challenges to success is achieving the deep interdisciplinarity involved, which often requires continuous collaboration among medical professionals, psychologists, HCI researchers, user experience designers, software developers and end-users. While some projects lack theoretical grounding or an evidence-base, others fail to involve users effectively in order to understand their needs, perceptions and contexts, resulting in technologies that go unused. Working together, researchers in HCI , health and the social sciences can improve the processes by which digital technologies are developed and distributed for the benefit of population-wide health and wellbeing. In this presentation, I will share some of the multidisciplinary evidence-based approaches to the development of health technologies formerly taken at the Wellbeing Technologies Lab in Sydney, Australia, and now starting at Imperial college London. I will describe some ideas on the contributions HCI can make to this field, and share a number of case studies in the domains of chronic illness, sleep, mental health and doctor-patient communication.