Speaker: Andrea Grimes, Ph.D. student in the Human Centered Computing program at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Date: Monday, March 9, 12:00-1:00pm

Location: Seminar Rm, 301 College Ave

Abstract:

"There are extreme health disparities that face segments of the U.S. population. For example, most diet-related health problems (e.g. obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure) affect the African American population disproportionately. Because of this disparity in health outcomes, public health researchers and government agencies consistently argue for a directed research agenda that identifies how we can improve the health of this population. They argue that to effectively reduce health disparities, researchers must take a culturally informed approach to designing health interventions, one that appreciates the way in which culture shapes and affects health practices and attitudes. While the HCI community has shown the potential of technology to promote healthy lifestyles, little work has examined the role that technology might play in addressing health disparities.

In this talk, I will describe the research that I have done to design technology that addresses the nutrition-related health problems that affect low-income African American communities. In particular, I will discuss the field work that I have done to identify design implications, the system that I built and evaluated as a result of this field work, and my plans for future work. Finally, I will describe how through my research I have progressively articulated design recommendations for health technologies that account for the affects of culture on nutrition in the African American population."

For more information, please visit
http://www.infosci.cornell.edu/about/SIGCHI.html

For more information, please contact Hronn Brynjarsdottir (hb47@cs.cornell.edu).

3/5/09 Corinne