Aisling Ann O'Kane

I am an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Postdoctoral Research Fellow and a human factors engineer interested in the impact of user experience on the adoption, use, and misuse of personal medical, health and wellbeing technologies, a space between human factors engineering and human-computer interaction.

My PhD focused on the situated use of Type 1 Diabetes technologies by adults using 'in the wild' exploratory methods, and how everyday life influences use and adoption of these devices. My fellowship is building on the finding that individual differences greatly influence people's choices to adopt and use these devices through examining the DIY diabetes open-source maker movement which is already designing, manufacturing, disseminating, and customising bespoke healthcare technology. I am examining how these designs can be safely disseminated past the early adopters to benefit a larger group of adults that want personalised health technologies.

Information on related projects can be found here: mobilemedicaldeviceresearch.wordpress.com

Brief biography

I am from Toronto, Canada where I gained a degree in Industrial Engineering and a minor in Psychology from the University of Toronto and completed my undergraduate thesis on driver distraction with Prof. Mark Chignell. After graduating, I worked for almost three years as a human factors engineering associate consultant in the nuclear domain. I moved to Sweden for my Master's in Interactive Systems Engineering at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and conducted my thesis research at the Mobile Life Centre in Stockholm and also at the Interactive Intelligence Centre at TU Delft in the Netherlands on user trust in technology, supervised by Prof. Kristina Höök and Dr. Alina Huldtgren. Before starting at UCLIC, I completed an internship at Microsoft Research in Cambridge supervised by Dr. Helena Mentis focusing on diabetes patients and diabetes specialists' information needs and sharing practices. I defended my Computer Science PhD disseration on the situated use of Type 1 Diabetes technologies in January 2016, with Prof. Ann Blandford and Prof. Yvonne Rogers as my supervisors and Prof. Peter Wright and Prof. Nadia Berthouze as my examiners.