Past research has guided the creation of misinformation tools and strategies that users can adopt to protect themselves against false health information on certain text- and image-based social media platforms, such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. However, these tools and strategies are often not generalizable to video-based platforms, such as Youtube. Therefore, our research study aims to understand the thought processes, behaviors, and concerns users have when they encounter health information on Youtube to facilitate users' ability to recognize false information.
Our research group examines how novel interactive computing systems can help people to achieve a state of wellness, as defined by the World Health Organization: "Wellness is the realisation of the fullest potential of an individual physically, psychologically, socially, spiritually and economically."
We are particularly interested in issues of health equity, designing innovative software tools for populations who disproportionately experience barriers to wellness. To this end, our research explores how social, mobile, and ubiquitous software systems can support health literacy, healthy behaviors, and health advocacy in low-socioeconomic and racial/ethnic minority groups. The Wellness Technology Lab utilizes user-centered, participatory design methods to design and build engaging and motivating software systems, and conducts in-depth field studies to evaluate user experience with and impact of these tools. Our work contributes to the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), social computing, ubiquitous computing (Ubicomp), and personal/consumer health informatics.
