EIT Health/ACM SIGCHI eHealth Summer School 2017, week 1 in Dublin

The EIT Health/SIGCHI eHealth summer school was last week in Dublin. A summer school is a great opportunity for PhD students and other researchers to learn more about a subject and to get connected to other people with a similar interest. This summer school was about HCI and eHealth, and therefore a whole bunch from us participated, more exactly Christiane, Diane, Jonas, Åsa and me! (or Åsa is one of the organizers). The summer school will continue with one more week in the end of August, and that time in Stockholm and Uppsala!

The Dublin week of the summer school was very well organized by Gavin Doherty from Trinity College Dublin. The participants were a good mix between innovators and eHealth researchers from different related disciplines such as HCI, Technology, Health Sciences and Psychology, and also patients participated! We got to hear many good talks during the week, and had hands on exercises and group work. The talks covered for example patient and public involvement, user centered design, how to use fiction in the design process, designing for behavior change, inclusive design, internet interventions, ethics in eHealth, and some very interesting case studies! Geraldine Fitzpatrick from TU Wien gave a lecture called “Putting eHealth in context” and mentioned that instead of designing “smart” systems, we should focus on systems that enable people to make their own decisions.

During a inspiring lecture by Madeline Balaam (OpenLab, University of Newcastle) about design ideation we got to do a short workshop to generate design solutions for eHealth related to different technologies, contexts, users, and health conditions.

The picture is from Madeline Balaam’s lecture about user centred design, and the development of the app FeedFinder, which is an app for finding good breastfeeding locations!

Ann Blandford from University College London gave a lecture about medical device safety. One of the important things she said was to design for resilience by “empowering people to be creative within the bounds of understood safety practices”.

You can read more about the summer school in Jonas’ blog (day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), in Åsa’s blog, and in Diane’s blog (here, and here)! The week in Dublin was great and now I am really looking forward to the second week of the summer school in Stockholm and Uppsala!

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Ida Löscher

PhD Student at Uppsala University

Ida Löscher (Bodin) has a Master of Science in Engineering degree in Product Realization, and a Master in Ergonomics and Human-Technology-Organisation, both from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.