Geraldine Fitzpatrick is Professor of Design and Assessment of Technology and Head of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Group at the Faculty of Informatics in the Vienna University of Technology.
Previously she worked as Director of the Interact Lab in the Informatics Department at Sussex University UK, a Senior Manager of User Experience at Sapient London, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Distributed Systems Technology Centre and Centre for Online Health in Australia. She also has a clinical background, having worked as a nurse and midwife in the early part of her career.
Geraldine has a published monograph and over 80 refereed articles. Her research is at the intersection of social and computer sciences, with a particular interest in technology-support for healthcare, health and well-being and older people, and supporting social interaction and quality of life more generally.
New challenges for health IT – design fit for life
Technology is seen as the critical enabler for moving care out of clinical settings into patients’ hands and homes, and for empowering people to be active in their own health and well-being. This presents a radically different design space for health IT and for health practice; it fundamentally challenges our notions of patient, clinician, care and home. I’d like to reflect on some of these challenges and ask how we can design technologies that fit into our lives and deliver value to both the people who use them and their care providers.