Designing Personal Informatics Systems to Support Lupus Self-Management
Project ID: 2531ad1511
(You will need this ID for your application)
Research Theme: Healthcare Technologies
UCL Lead department: Computer Science
Lead Supervisor: Amid Ayobi
Project Summary:
Autoimmune conditions are on the rise and affect about one in ten individuals in the UK. Autoimmune conditions occur when the autoimmune system mistakenly attacks the healthy body. This can cause a wide range of symptoms and adversely affect quality of life. Examples of autoimmune conditions are lupus, arthritis, and multiple sclerosis. This project will focus on lupus and investigate how personal informatics systems can be designed to support people living with lupus in self-managing their health and wellbeing.
Lupus (systemic lupus erythematosus) is an autoimmune condition that can cause an idiosyncratic range of symptoms, including rashes, pain, fatigue, and depression. Documenting and understanding the severity of relapsing and remitting symptoms can be difficult for both people with lupus and clinicians. Digital personal informatics systems provide significant potential to support people in self-tracking symptoms and reporting health changes to inform clinical decision-making.
This project will apply a human-centred design approach and aims to: (1) improve understanding of the lived experiences and digital needs of people with lupus; (2) design novel personal informatics systems that support the needs of people with lupus; and (3) evaluate prototypes of these systems in daily life. A potential personal informatics system could, for example, leverage artificial intelligence functionalities to enable people with lupus to generate daily symptom summaries and review trends before clinical appointments.
We will collaborate with online groups, charitable organisations, and ethnic minority communities. We are looking for PhD candidates who are passionate about human-centred and participatory research and have an interdisciplinary professional background (e.g., human-computer interaction, digital health, medical anthropology, etc.).