Hi, I'm Elena Agapie from UC Irvine.
And on behalf of my collaborators
I'm excited to present our paper on collaborations between HCI and health researchers using a
team science perspective.
Design and human centered computing approaches are increasingly used in health research.
Looking at the funding of health research from the US National Institutes of Health,
there's been an increase in the funded research every year that uses human centered design.
Over 500 Health proposals were funded with at least $200 million in the last 10 years.
And all of these involving human or user centered design.
And this also includes starting to fund research centers, and training programs that aim to
bring together HCI and health researchers.
To understand collaboration between HCI and health researchers we use a team science lens.
Team Science is a research field that studies scientific collaboration done in teams and
how teams work together to achieve their goals and objectives.
In this paper, we'll take a team science lens to study challenges and opportunities for
supporting teams that have HCI and health researchers.
so the success of team based scholarly work depends on a lot of circumstances and events,
at different levels of the ecosystem in which research is produced.
The success depends on how well aligned each of these layers of the ecosystem are.
For example, for a science team to create and define new knowledge, it is dependent
on the abilities of its team members to execute tasks, their interpersonal skills, their training,
but at the same time, the productivity of the team even the existence of the team is
impacted by the supported it receives from institutional leaders or research funding
agencies.
So there are a lot of things that need to be aligned for teams to be successful.
In this paper, we aim to understand the challenges of early and mid career HCI and house researchers
encountered when they're in leading roles collaborating together, and how do they go
about resolving those challenges.
We interviewed participants age for HCI.
Researchers from 16 Different institutions, including R2 universities, and liberal arts
schools, who worked on creating technologies with health researchers using human user centered
design process.
In this research, we use Hall's model to highlight how research integration is achieved between
team members at different levels of the research lifecycle.
You can read more about this model, and the differences between different stages of research
in the paper, and I will highlight a few of the findings.
So at the first stage of research, team members are developing research ideas, and defining
the problem that they're going to work on and starting the collaboration.
And what we found at this stage was a high load on the individual to find collaborators.
Some people spent years to find one, putting in expensive efforts.
For example, one participant cold email, people had their department chair and Dean introduced
them to health researchers had former PhD mentors introduce researchers, and still spend
a couple of years until they were able to find someone as a collaborator.
In turn, participants found it useful when there were structural programs that made it
easier to find collaborators exceed grants, or even doing postdoctoral programs.
These were not always available
at the next stage, researchers conceptualized research and at this stage a major challenge
was that health researchers had misperceptions of what the HCI researcher role is.
For example, this involved thinking they were a practitioner who just made designs tools,
or a programmer who builds what they're told, or usability tester who evaluates the system
afterwards.
This led to the collaborations either not starting or ending.
or creating tension in the collaborative.
Next Researchers implement research that they conceptualize, but at this stage HCI researchers
found that there were method misalignments.
For example, health collaborators not necessarily understanding the role of qualitative data
or design methods not being taken seriously thinking these are anecdotes are being creative
some participants found ways to mediate such misunderstandings through artifacts, showing
end results, technology, the technologies they build on the past, or how methods like
sketching are useful at other stages of the research process.
When it came to engaging in translational, research, research findings, taking research
and applying it to concrete problems and practical settings, like clinical settings.
Our participants stated this was not as valued of a contribution at their stages in their
career and would compromise on it, even if they were interested in doing this work.
participants also felt like they were not trained in translational methods.
Such challenges are common for cross disciplinary collaborations.
But fields like team science have identified best practices to address these exact challenges,
particularly at the systemic and institutional level.
Team Science recommends creating a training environment in which scholars are immersed
in cross disciplinary work from the doctoral levels up including when they are faculty
some training institutes are already starting to develop with this mission.
These models can provide learnings for how to scale to support a larger part of our research
community.
Another recommendation is to support and reward word translational work as a scholarly contribution.
Some scholars like Anker or Dopp and colleagues have been writing papers and health informatics
or implementation science.
So creating translational toolkits, shared vocabularies and artifacts that illustrate
HCI that methods can support better collaboration.
There are multiple team science toolkits to support communication between team members
at different stages of research, goals, responsibilities, approaches to research.
We encourage flexibility and publication of research, where paper authors acknowledge
the role that different research team played in creating that research and implementing
it.
Where in the research lifecycle different researchers participated and how they influence
the designs that were created, and how their research can be translated to actual clinical
settings.
Read our paper to learn more about the different levels of research, integration in teams,
more findings and discussion points, please reach out if you're interested in the use
of human centered design approaches in health research.