A blog for the TAS for Health project
Author: Liz Dowthwaite, Project Lead Contact, Research Fellow, University of Nottingham
We are now about 9 months into the TAS for Health project and are well overdue for an update! We spent the first six months of the project working on understanding the different issues of the project from a variety of viewpoints. This included looking at the project from our different disciplines as researchers, and incorporating our ideas with those of two user groups to ensure that the project aligned with their needs. Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is extremely important to this project and we were keen to make sure that our research questions and methods were appropriate to our aims of developing trustworthy technology for healthcare at home.
The first group we have been engaging with is Different Strokes Southampton. Different Strokes are a charity run by younger stroke survivors for younger stroke survivors. The Southampton wing have regular meetings that they were kind enough to allow us to attend a few times to ‘pitch’ our research ideas and receive feedback. The second group is the Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) group for Nottingham MS Research Group. We were also able to attend a couple of their regular research meetings to discuss our ideas. Both groups have been invaluable in shaping our thinking about how a smart mirror might be useful for rehabilitation and day-to-day care, and the potential issues that users might have, especially around consent, personalisation, and sharing data with others.
We have a wide range of researchers from different disciplines contributing to the project: mental health and wellbeing, human factors and human-computer interaction, architecture and built environment, clinical psychology and neuropsychology, and health sciences and rehabilitation. It was an interesting challenge to incorporate everyone’s research interests and viewpoints into the project, and one of the outputs of the project will be a reflection from the different disciplines about the findings of the research. We have highly engaged monthly discussions about the potential issues from our varied viewpoints, as well as working to ensure that the information coming out of our RRI groups is incorporated into our thinking and the design of studies. This has been an extremely valuable process, and each of us has been challenged to think about things in different ways and consider new approaches.
We asked our team to provide some insight into why this project was particularly interesting to them. Here’s what they said.
Dr David Crepaz-Keay is Head of Applied Learning at the Mental Health Foundation, our partner organisation in this project. He says “This project has been very helpful in stimulating our thinking about the impact of emerging technology and in particular the questions raised for public mental health as this tech becomes more widespread”.
Roshan das Nair is a Professor of Clinical Psychology & Neuropsychology at the University of Nottingham, working with people with multiple sclerosis to better understand and treat psychological issues stemming from neurological conditions. He says “Our ultimate goal is to use technology to improve the lives of those who are affected by different health problems. I am excited to be working with on TAS projects because they enable us to think through some of the challenges we face when embedding technologies in people’s daily lives, and understanding how such challenges can be overcome with teamwork with researchers, clinicians, tech developers, and patients and the public.”
Dr Ann-Marie Hughes is an Associate Professor within the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Southampton. She works with people who have had a stroke to create novel rehabilitation technologies. She says “I am really excited to be working with such a great team on the TAS to support healthcare experiences project. The project is illuminating how the technology might be useful in people’s homes and lives, as well as what their concerns around the technology and its installation are. I am thinking differently because of the collaboration and gaining insights that will impact on my own area of research – rehabilitation technology for use in people’s homes.”
Dr Sue Cobb is Associate Professor of Human Factors at the University of Nottingham. She works on community-based multi-disciplinary projects to develop new technologies for education and training, rehabilitation and healthcare. She says “I find this project fascinating because working in a multi-disciplinary team provides insightful discussion from different perspectives. This has challenged me to think about different interpretations that people may have of information presented to them via the mirror on the wall in their home. When this information relates to personal healthcare, decision making with regards to the design and use of technology for data collection, management, storage, sharing and presentation is far more complex than I have previously considered.”
We are also lucky enough to be working with one of the TAS Artists in Residence, Rachel Jacobs. Look out for a blog post from her soon!
In amongst all this scoping, we have also been presenting our project to the TAS community and beyond. We presented at the TAS/RUSI conference “Trusting Machines? Cross-sector Lessons from Healthcare and Security” and ran a workshop at the TAS All Hands Meeting on design fictions for autonomous healthcare at home (A-HAH!), which you can see here.
In our current phase of the research, we have three interns working with us to run a series of workshops with people who have had a stroke and people with MS. As part of these workshops, we have developed some short scenarios to illustrate the use of smart mirrors for health and wellbeing monitoring. You can see some examples here.
Despite the challenges of engaging such a broad range of researchers and users, especially during a pandemic, it is vital that research into healthcare in the home takes this truly multidisciplinary and inclusive approach to produce outputs that are relevant, workable, and trustworthy. We are looking forward to sharing the results of the project with the wider TAS community!