Communications of the ACM
A Career Built on Using Technology to Help Others
Credit: Early Childhood Education Lab
Everyone deserves the access and opportunity to have a good and fulfilling life. This belief is foundational to my work. Technologies can only contribute toward this goal when they are designed from an understanding of what makes a life good for the people concerned.
I grew up caring for others, leading me to my first career as a registered nurse. I loved the job but started looking for other options when I couldn't quite leave behind the emotional labor of the work at home. At that time, I wanted a more socially detached role; I enrolled in computer science at the University of Glasgow. My first human-computer interaction (HCI) lecture very quickly pulled me back to concerns about people and showed me how technology could be designed to help or harm them. I stayed on to do my Ph.D., where I examined persuasive computing and its application in the health-related behavioral-change domain. During this time, I helped develop Shakra, a mobile phone app that tracked daily activity levels to explore attitudes to behavioral monitoring and information sharing between peer groups. Additional studies highlighted a mismatch between the biomedical model of health that was embodied in many emerging applications and the lived experience of interviewees and their surrounding social determinants of health.
No entries found