We would like to draw your attention to our second workshop on the design of healthy user interfaces (HEALTHI) on March 21, 2022. It was co-located with the virtual ACM IUI conference 2022 (March 21 to 25). The theme of the workshop revolved around the intersection of design, human factors, AI and health.

The HEALTHI workshop featured several accepted submission presentations and two amazing keynote speakers:

About Steve Downs

Steve Downs is co-founder at Building H, a project to build health into everyday life by harnessing innovation to reimagine how we eat, sleep, get around, socialize and entertain ourselves — to be healthy by design. Previously, Steve was chief technology and strategy officer at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), where he led a transformation of the Foundation’s practice of program strategy. Steve held a variety of management roles at RWJF — including chief technology and information officer and leader of the foundation’s innovation portfolio — while funding and working directly with innovators at the intersection of tech and health.

About the Industry Keynote

The U.S. is in the midst of a chronic disease epidemic that’s been growing steadily over several decades. The epidemic is driven by gradual changes in lifestyles, which have been strongly influenced by gradual changes in our environments — and specifically in the environments created by consumer products and services — the cars, televisions, smartphones, packaged foods and restaurants — that shape our daily lives. Each generation of technology creates new products and services that maximize convenience and efficiency, and by doing so, makes it hard for people to live healthy lives. As new technologies emerge, there is plenty of innovation focused on applying them to address the consequences of the situation, but an important and largely untapped opportunity exists to harness new technologies to tackle the problem at its roots — to reimagine how everyday life could be healthy by design.

About Timothy Bickmore

Dr. Timothy Bickmore is a Professor and Associate Dean for Research in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston. The focus of his research is on the development and evaluation of relational agents, virtual and robotic, that emulate face-to-face interactions between health providers and patients. These agents have been used in automated health education and long-term health behavior change interventions, spanning preventive medicine and wellness promotion, chronic disease management, inpatient care, substance misuse screening and treatment, mental health treatment, and palliative care. His systems have been evaluated in multiple clinical trials with results published in medical journals including JAMA and The Lancet. Prior to Northeastern, Dr. Bickmore served as an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Bickmore received his Ph.D. from MIT, doing his dissertation work in the Media Lab studying interactions between people and embodied conversational agents in task contexts, such as healthcare, in which social-emotional behavior can be used to improve outcomes.

About the Academic Keynote

Relational agents are computer agents designed to build and maintain long-term, social-emotional relationships with people, and are particularly effective for tasks in which long-term interactions and trust relationships are known to be important, such as in health counseling. When deployed on mobile devices, relational agents have the potential to not only develop strong therapeutic relationships with users but to provide a ubiquitous channel for health education and behavior change for a variety of health conditions. In this talk, I will focus on the challenges in deploying relational agents on mobile devices for health interventions, along with the unique affordances this combination of platform and medium provides. I will describe several mobile agent-based interventions my lab has developed and currently have in a clinical trial, spanning chronic disease management for patients with atrial fibrillation, preconception care promotion for women in Lesotho, wellness promotion for members of predominately African American churches, and COVID vaccination promotion. I will also discuss design studies we have conducted that contrast agent-based interfaces with conventional GUI-based interfaces on smartphones for a variety of healthcare tasks.

Please find details and the full schedule here: https://sites.google.com/cornell.edu/healthi/program.

Thank you,

Workshop Chairs

• Katrin Hänsel, School of Medicine, Yale University
• Michael Sobolev, Northwell Health and Cornell Tech
• Tobias Kowatsch, Centre for Digital Health Interventions, ETH Zurich & University of St.Gallen
• Rafael A. Calvo, Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London

Technical Program Committee

• Alain Starke, TU Eindhoven
• Alexander T. Adams, Cornell Tech
• Caterina Bérubé, ETH Zürich
• Chang Siang Lim, Singapore-ETH Centre
• Emily Tseng, Cornell Tech
• Felix Wortmann, University of St. Gallen
• Filipe Barata, ETH Zürich
• Julio Vega, Pittsburgh University
• Marios Constantinides, Bell Labs
• Varun Mishra, Dartmouth College