Call for participation

Healthcare technologies are increasingly pervasive, moving into hospital wards and patients’ homes, presenting new challenges to evaluation. This one-day workshop will provide a timely opportunity for participants to share and learn from each other’s experiences of evaluating new healthcare technologies. The workshop will be organized around a series of activities, through which we will discuss how to conduct evaluations which allow assessment of the overall impact of technology in its context of use. We will elaborate the challenges in the evaluation of new healthcare technologies, raise questions about what we should evaluate and explore how existing methods of HCI evaluation could be adapted and expanded. We will establish an agenda for the evaluation of new technologies in healthcare and develop a community of HCI practitioners to take the agenda forward.

We encourage submissions from practitioners, clinicians and researchers who have experience of evaluating new healthcare technologies. Potential participants should submit a position paper to the organizers (rebecca.randell.1@city.ac.uk) by October 23, 2008. Papers should be 3-4 pages in the CHI Conference Extended Abstracts Format and should detail your past work in this area, your perspectives on the challenges and approaches for overcoming those challenges. Participants will be notified of acceptance or rejection by November 28, 2008. At least one author of each accepted position paper needs to register for the workshop and one or more days of the conference. The outcome of the workshop will be a collection of articles for a special issue of a journal. It is hoped that workshop participants will collaborate in developing new research proposals on the topic of evaluating new interactions in healthcare. A poster summarizing the results of the workshop will be displayed at the CHI conference.