Meredith Skeels -Research

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Research
	My focus is on solving information problems in the domains of medicine and health. I am a PhD Candidate in Biomedical and Health Informatics at the University of Washington and have a BS in Informatics from the Information School at the University of Washington. My approach is to I bring knowledge from information science and human-computer interaction to the design of health information technology. My current research is focused on health consumers. Two of my ongoing research projects are… Personal Health Information Management – I am working with the iMed research group and Dr. Wanda Pratt on this NIH funded research. We are designing technology to support breast cancer patients in managing their personal health information. As part of this project, I use participatory design methods to include breast cancer patients in the design process. We work together to understand the challenges breast cancer patients face, how technology can play a positive role in alleviating those challenges, and to design new technology to help future breast cancer patients. Sharing by Design – My dissertation research is focused on understanding how and why people share health information with their social networks (e.g. family and friends), what role technology should play in sharing this information, and how to make sharing features transparent to users. The central problem I am addressing is that up-to-date social networks can result in a more supportive and helpful than out of touch networks, but updating people can be difficult and time consuming. When people feel the worst is when their social networks most need to know what is going on but, paradoxically, it is also when people are least able to communicate what they’re going through. I am using interviews, an online questionnaire, and participatory design (PD) to understand how and why people share health information now. I am also working with breast cancer patients to design a new system for sharing health information with social networks. The last phase of this research is identifying how to make transparent sharing interfaces so users can easily tell what health information they are sharing and who they are sharing it with. I hope this research will influence the design of future consumer health technology (e.g. PHRs).
Publications
	Meredith M. Skeels, Kenton T. Unruh, Christopher Powell, and Wanda Pratt. Catalyzing Social Support for Breast Cancer Patients. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2010), April 2010. Atlanta, GA. PDF
	Kenton T. Unruh, Meredith M. Skeels, Andrea Civan-Hartzler, and Wanda Pratt. Transforming Clinic Environments into Information Workspaces for Patients. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2010), April 2010. Atlanta, GA. PDF
	Andrea Civan, David McDonald, Meredith M. Skeels, Marlee Mukai, and Wanda Pratt. Bringing the Field into Focus: User-Centered Design of a Patient Expertise Locator. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2010), April 2010. Atlanta, GA. Coming Soon
	Meredith M. Skeels and Jonathan Grudin. When Social Networks Cross Boundaries: A Case Study of Workplace Use of Facebook and LinkedIn. Proceedings of GROUP 2009, May 2009. PDF
	Meredith M. Skeels, Bongshin Lee, Greg Smith, and George G. Robertson. Revealing Uncertainty for Information Visualization. Information Visualization, [Accepted]. (extended version of AVI paper)
	Meredith M. Skeels, Bongshin Lee, Greg Smith, and George G. Robertson. Revealing Uncertainty for Information Visualization. Proceedings of AVI 2008, 376-379. (short paper)
	Meredith M. Skeels and Wanda Pratt. Participatory Design with Health Consumers. Poster in Proc. of the American Medical Informatics Association Fall Symposium (AMIA'08), November 2008. Washington, D.C. PubMed PDF Handout PDF
	Meredith M. Skeels, Ann Kurth, Marc Clausen, Anneleen Severynen, and Hal Garcia-Smith. CARE+ User Study: Usability and Attitudes Towards a Tablet PC Computer Counseling Tool for HIV+ Men and Women. Proc. of the American Medical Informatics Association Fall Symposium (AMIA'06), November 2006. Washington, D.C. PubMed PDF
	Andrea Civan, Meredith M. Skeels, Anna Stolyar, and Wanda Pratt. Personal Health Information Management: Consumers’ Perspectives. Proc. of the American Medical Informatics Association Fall Symposium (AMIA'06), November 2006. Washington, D.C. PubMed PDF
	Wanda Pratt, Kenton Unruh, Andrea Civan, and Meredith Skeels. Personal health information management. Communications of the ACM, January 2006. 49(1), p.51-55. ACM Portal
	Mary Czerwinski, Douglas W. Gage, Jim Gemmell, Catherine C. Marshall, Manuel A. Perez-Quinonesis, Meredith M. Skeels, and Tiziana Catarci. Digital memories in an era of ubiquitous computing and abundant storage. Communications of the ACM, January 2006. 49(1), p.44-50. ACM Portal
	Meredith M. Skeels, Kiera Henning, Meliha Yetisgen-Yildiz, and Wanda Pratt. Interaction Design for Literature-Based Discovery. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2005), April 2005. Portland, OR. ACM Portal
Links
	At the University of Washington my advisor is Dr. Wanda Pratt and I am part of the iMed research group. I am now a PhD Candidate in Biomedical and Health Informatics within the School of Medicine at the University of Washington. I am also part of the DUB group at UW, which is an alliance of people exploring issues in HCI.
Keywords
	consumer health informatics, human-computer interaction, medical informatics, design methods, participatory design, user-centered design, qualitative methods, sharing, privacy, information visualization, social networking software, medical history, helping

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