My colleagues and I are organising a workshop that has been accepted for the CHI 2015 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing. The workshop will be held on 18th or 19th April in Seoul. 

The workshop aims to bring together HCI researchers who are working in a range of sensitive and difficult settings, to discuss ethical challenges they have encountered in their research. HCI researchers are now conducting research in increasingly sensitive settings - designing, implementing, and evaluating technologies to support end-of-life care, people who are bereaved, homeless, and people with complex mental or physical health problems. In my research with socially isolated older adults, ethics has been an ongoing and emergent challenge; dealing with ethical encounters requires reflection and careful decision-making. We wanted to organise this workshop to enable other HCI researchers who face ethical encounters to share, and learn from, each other's experiences. 

For more information see the workshop website and the call for participation. Workshop position papers (4-6 pages) are due on Monday 5th January. 

My colleagues and I recently had an article published in the journal Information Technology & People. The article draws on interviews with women who had Type 1 diabetes and were pregnant, planning for pregnancy, or had recently had a baby at the time of the interview. The research examined the role new technologies - particularly IT-enabled insulin pumps, or "smartpumps" - played in assisting the women to manage their diabetes during (or before/after) pregnancy. Using an Activity Theory lens, we identified the contradictions that arose when new technologies were introduced into this complex health management activity. 

Here are the full publication details: 
Waycott, J., Scheepers, R., Davis, H., Howard, S., & Sonenberg, L. (2014). The individual in multiple interacting activity systems: IT-supported diabetes management. Information, Technology & People, 27(4), 463-481.