International Health Humanities Network Membership

I am a researcher, currently working in the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham, and interested in the various ways that technology can support effective self-expression and human interaction. I also spent a year training as a humanistic psychotherapist at the Sherwood Psychotherapy Training Insitute, and have sought to apply what I learnt in this period to my research work.

For my PhD, I studied the homes of individuals who had experienced a stroke, and considered how best to design appropriate rehabilitation technology in light of the disruptive effect of a stroke on the highly personal and meaningful nature of the home environment. This resulted in an evaluation of four technologies that were tailored to the needs of specific individuals and their environments. I also considered the question of how to systematice the process of design, to allow tailored technologies to be deployed on a broader scale. My PhD is available as a digital document here:

http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/14153/

More recently, I've been working with Francesca Beard, a performance poet and workshop facilitator, to explore the use of commodity technologies such as mobile phones to support individuals in exploring and sharing their own experiences with others; this work culminated in StoryVerse, an experimental spoken word event hosted by the University of Nottingham, which used mobile phones as a mechanism to allow audience members to integrate their own experiences into a live performance.

I'm particularly interested in the use of technology to address common mental health problems, and have been working with Pete Bower and Sarah Knowles at the University of Manchester to study the real-world experience of engaging with large-scale deployments of computerised therapy services in the UK.