Title: Designing Health Technology With and For Older Adults

Speaker: Eun Kyoung Choe (University of Maryland)
Date: June 03, 2026, 15h
Where: C6.3.27
Invited by: Rúben Gouveia
(coffee break included)

Abstract: The rise of digital health technologies has transformed how people manage their health, making it easier to collect, share, and reflect on personal health data. While these tools have shown promise for promoting healthy lifestyles and managing chronic conditions, they have inadvertently introduced barriers for individuals marginalized by mainstream technologies, exacerbating health disparities. One group I have focused on is older adults—frequently the intended beneficiaries of health technology, but rarely its designed-for users.
In this talk, I will discuss my research on designing health technology with and for older adults. I trace three intertwined design principles across several projects. Co-design with older adults reshaped what we even consider trackable, surfacing the low-exertion activities that mainstream trackers miss. Multimodal interaction, particularly speech-based annotation on a smartwatch, let older adults capture rich activity context in their own words, yielding new datasets and personalized tracking models. Most recently, I expand the design space to the older adult and caregiver dyad through Aidara, an LLM-powered mobile assistant for over-the-counter medication decisions. I close by reflecting on open questions for the field of HCI as AI moves into safety-critical health decisions.

Bio: Eun Kyoung Choe is a Professor in the College of Information at University of Maryland, College Park. Her research bridges the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Health Informatics, and Ubiquitous Computing. With an overarching goal of empowering individuals, she designs and studies technologies to promote health and well-being. She investigates the intersection of health and disability to create accessible health technologies for marginalized populations. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Microsoft Research. She received her B.S. from KAIST, M.S. from University of California, Berkeley, and Ph.D. in Information Science from University of Washington, from which she received a distinguished alumni award in 2024 for her contributions to the information field.