Every Friday in winter quarter the department of Human Centered Design & Engineering brings industry experts to speak about current issues in user experience (UX) research and design.

All talks are free and open to the public. Students register for course credit with HCDE 521.

Talk title
Lessons Learned from Designing Interventions for Health and Wellbeing

Talk abstract
Affective computing is emerging as an important field in the design of emotional, intelligent, conversational agents that can be used in the healthcare arena, but also in everyday life.  In addition, ubiquitous recording, both in the field and in the doctor's office/patient's home, has influenced how we think about wellbeing in the future. In our research, we use sensing technologies to develop contextualized and precise delivery of interventions, both in terms of the content and in the timing the intervention delivery, using machine learning algorithms. I will discuss how we use affective computing technologies to deliver just in time health interventions for improved health and for personal, behavioral reflection. For example, I will describe the Entendre project, which has implications for the design of visual feedback to encourage empathic patient-centered communication. I will also talk about ParentGuardian, a wearable sensing system that delivers just in time interventions to parents with ADHD children. In addition, I'll present our findings from two applications that deliver interventions and skills from psychology for coping with conditions ranging from general stress and depression to serious mental illness, like the intent to commit suicide, using conversational agents that users trust. Finally, I'll briefly touch on some of our designs for helping users to reflect on their daily behaviors in order to improve general well-being.

About the speaker 
Dr. Mary Czerwinski is a Principal Researcher and Research Manager of the Visualization and Interaction (VIBE) Research Group. Mary's latest research focuses primarily on emotion tracking and intervention design and delivery, information worker task management and health and wellness for individuals and groups. Her research background is in visual attention and multitasking. She holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Indiana University in Bloomington. Mary was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award, was inducted into the CHI Academy, and became an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2010. She also received the Distinguished Alumni award from Indiana University's Brain and Psychological Sciences department in 2014. Mary became a Fellow of the ACM in 2016. More information about Dr. Czerwinski can be found at her website.