Elizabeth Mynatt (Georgia Tech)

Discovering the Potential and Pitfalls of Ubiquitous Computing to Transform Healthcare

The unique capabilities of pervasive computing technologies have the potential to transform healthcare by shifting care from institutional to home settings, by helping individuals engage in their own care, by proactively identifying individuals that need care, and by creating a network of communication and collaboration channels that extends healthcare delivery to everyday settings.

Yet in the face of these possibilities, many design challenges persist at the boundaries of informal everyday life and formal healthcare systems and practices. In this talk, I will draw from a number of research projects that integrate human-centered design, computing, and intelligent systems, and health management theory to create promising approaches for promoting wellness, supporting healthy behaviors and delivering improved health outcomes.

About the Speaker

Dr. Elizabeth Mynatt is a Regents’ and Distinguished Professor in the College of Computing and the Executive Director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology that pursues innovative research to promote healthy, productive and fulfilling lives on a global scale. Over the past two decades, Mynatt’s research has focused on the role of ubiquitous computing in health. She currently leads the NCI funded MyPath project, creating an application that provides breast cancer patients with personalized recommendations during their cancer journey. Mynatt’s co-leads the Emory-Georgia Tech program to empower people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). She is also one of the principal researchers in the Aware Home Research Initiative; investigating the design of future home technologies, especially those that enable older adults to continue living independently as opposed to moving to an institutional care setting.

Mynatt has been recognized as an ACM Fellow, a member of the SIGCHI Academy, and a Sloan and Kavli research fellow. She has published more than 100 scientific papers and chaired the CHI 2010 conference, the premier international conference in human-computer interaction. Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 1998, Mynatt was a member of the research staff at Xerox PARC.