PhD Candidate, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Abstract
Designing Adaptive Technology to Provide Personalized Support to Cancer Patients
When managing cancer, people encounter many physical, emotional, social, and logistical challenges that impede on their quality of life and their ability to effectively manage their health. Helping people overcome these barriers is challenging, as the issues they face are not only broad, but also dynamic, changing over time. Timely access to health information can significantly improve a person’s illness management and quality of life, but often people feel under-informed or unable to find the necessary information. In this poster I present MyPath, an application connecting breast cancer patients to personalized, adaptive, and trusted health information. I also include results from the MyPath field study, which demonstrate how personalized health information can encourage active engagement in one’s health management.
Bio
Maia Jacobs is completing her PhD in Human Centered Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, advised by Elizabeth Mynatt. Maia’s research contributes to the fields of ubiquitous computing and personal health informatics through the development and assessment of novel approaches for mobile health tools to support chronic disease management. In recent work supported by an NIH R01 grant, Maia lead the development and evaluation of applications that offer personalized and adaptive support for breast cancer patients. Her evaluations of these systems provide scientific evidence that interactions with personal health tools positively influence healthcare experiences and impact health outcomes.
Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Maia received a B.S. degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and worked as a User Experience Specialist for Accenture Consulting. In Spring 2018, Maia will be joining Harvard University’s Center for Research on Computation and Society as a CRCS Postdoctoral Fellow.