Projects

Project Description

The Healthcare Journeys Lab aims to explore and understand the various facets of female health with the goals of designing new technologies to empower and engage women with their health. We focus our efforts on supporting the pregnancy healthcare journey, perinatal care, sexual awareness, reproductive rights, and utilization of resources. The HCJ lab has many ongoing projects, each of which is exploring a different aspect of women’s health. Some examples include, but are not limited to: sexual self awareness, which aims to investigate the influence of technology, the internet, and social media on sexual identity and security or insecurity in sex-related topics; birth rights, which has goals to understand the perceptions and knowledge women have of their birth rights and human rights, virtual birth support, which focuses on uncovering best practices of providing doula support over a distance, and emergency department use for gynecological care, whose purpose is to determine what demographics of people are coming into the emergency department, what kind of care they are seeking, and to what depth care plans are being created.

Technology or Computational Component

I take a human-centered approach to designing, building, and evaluating user-facing interactive technologies. In the context of this project, we will focus on requirements gathering (understanding our users) and designing/building mobile systems for data collection. An interest in women’s health is key if you are going to join this project as we are very focused on empowering women to engage with and understand their health over the course of their pregnancy. Students will be taught how to collect both qualitative and quantitative data, how to analyze those data, and how to design and build interactive systems based on those data.