Kevin Doherty | kevin.doherty@ucd.ie
For many concerned with the current status of healthcare, AI innovation cannot come quickly enough. And yet, the potential of AI tools and systems to shape healthcare is as often approached with great trepidation as celebrated by health professionals and patients alike. These fears take not only the form of privacy and security concerns but centre around the potential of AI tools to reduce patients to datapoints and professionals to aggregators — to make healthcare, in short, less caring.
This concern, we as members of the Inclusive Design for AI Healthcare Innovation Network, believe it essential we tackle head on. This, if we are not only to overcome the AI implementation gap, but realise the potential of AI systems to truly augment human-centred practices of care — championed by rather than imposed upon care workers.
We are currently engaged in a programme of patient and public involved research to provide each among us the means and opportunities to engage in the co-creation of the tools which will increasingly come to shape our health. And if you would like to learn more about or become involved in these efforts, we would love to hear from you.
This network of leading figures in Irish health innovation seeks to make a real difference for our academic communities, clinical professionals, and the general public by bridging the domains of medicine, computer science and design to realise increasingly inclusive cultures and accessible practices of responsible AI Healthcare innovation.
We are a team of academics and professionals spanning the UCD Schools of Information and Communication Studies (Dr. Kevin Doherty) and Computer Science (Dr. Rob Brennan), UCD’s Innovation Academy (Jiaqi Zhang and William Davis), the National College of Art & Design (Dr. Emma Creighton and Enda O'Dowd), the HSE Spark Innovation Programme (Dermot Burke), and St James's Hospital Dublin (Dr. Marie Ward). Our mission: to grant health professionals and patients alike a voice in our increasingly digital futures.
If we wish for patients, clinicians and communities of care to engage enthusiastically with meaningful and effective AI Healthcare systems, we must provide us each the means and opportunities to engage in the co-creation of these tools — as increasingly shape our health and wellbeing.
- Dr. Kevin Doherty is AdAstra Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at the School of Information and Communication Studies at UCD, where his research focuses on advancing a human-centred approach to care for the digital age — through the design, development and evaluation of digital tools to enhance the clinical practice of healthcare. Kevin is Director of UCD’s MSc in HCI Programme, a leading member of the cross-disciplinary HCI@UCD research group, and a member of the AI Healthcare Hub, the ADAPT Centre’s Health Working Group, UCD’s Community of Practice for Public Engagement, and the Copenhagen Center for Health Technology.
- Dr. Rob Brennan is Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science at UCD. His research focuses on developing resilient, knowledge-driven socio-technical systems for data governance, healthcare and AI. He is co-Principal Investigator in the SFI Empower Data Governance project and leads the ARK (Access Risk Knowledge) collaboration with the TCD Centre for Innovative Human Systems and St James’s Hospital. He is the data governance lead of the HSE National Patient Safety and Quality Directorate’s national maternity quality and safety signals system, sits on the MyHealth@IE Cross Government Integration Advisory Group, and leads the ADAPT Centre’s Law and Tech Working Group.
- Dr. Emma Creighton is Lecturer in Interaction and Product Design at the School of Design in the National College of Art and Design (NCAD). She is Programme Director for the MA in Interaction Design and is a leading member of the NCAD DesignLabs, as well as lead of the NCAD DesignLabs: Health strand, where her research focuses on advancing the field of design for health through design-led interdisciplinary research with a range collaborators and partners. She is currently working in partnership with HSE Spark Innovation to develop new approaches to design for health that prioritise patient-centered care and improve health outcomes.
- Enda O’Dowd is lecturer in Product Design and course coordinator of the MSc in Medical Device Design at NCAD. He is a strong advocate for studio education and the experiential learning it enables — believing that design-led projects allow professionals to apply science and technology within an iterative, creative and human-centred process of analysis and synthesis permitting the scientific and engineering rigour necessary for the design of medical devices. His research interests span the design of products, services and business models for the complex ecosystems found in both medical care and the circular economy.
- Dermot Burke is an Innovation Specialist and Programme Operations Lead at the HSE Spark Innovation Programme. A physiotherapist by background, he has worked in public and private healthcare systems across the UK and Ireland, lending Dermot a wealth of both clinical and systems knowledge and experience. He has PostGrad Diplomas in Healthcare Innovation (TCD) and Service Design (NCAD) which inform his practice and approach to healthcare challenges. He has worked as a Health-Tech Consultant and was Product Manager at Irish health-tech startup CushlaHealth. Dermot’s work at the intersection of healthcare, technology and human-centred design drives everyday positive change in patient-outcomes and health-service delivery.
- Dr. Marie E. Ward is an international award-winning embedded health systems improvement researcher at St James's Hospital, and Adjunct Assistant Professor at TCD’s Centre for Innovative Human Systems. Marie engages in human factors research and consultancy with industries to enable patient and staff safety and wellbeing from a systems perspective and the co-design of new systems through a socio-technical lens. Marie is lecturer of Managing Risk and System Change at TCD and Human Factors in Patient Safety at RCSI; Chairperson of the Irish Human Factors and Ergonomics Society; and member of the Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors (UK) special interest group on AI in healthcare.
- Jiaqi Zhang is Technology Integration Manager at the UCD Innovation Academy where she leverages digital technologies including AR/VR/MR and blockchain to enhance experiential education. Jiaqi holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has led VR/AR development for public engagement with Dublin City Council and contributed to research projects at University College London and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was awarded the University for All Professional Staff Grant to lead the IA Maker Residency Program, focusing on advancing technology accessibility.
- William Davis is the Technology Integration Manager at the UCD Innovation Academy, with over a decade of experience leading teams and consulting in the fabrication and MakerSpace/Hackerspace community. He currently manages the MakerSpace at the UCD Innovation Academy and consults on diverse projects requiring bespoke builds across multiple elds, including biology, veterinary medicine, and archaeology. William lectures on design thinking methodology, entrepreneurship, and fabrication methods including 3D printing, laser cutting, mold making, and electronics prototyping. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he led a team of makers, healthcare professionals, designers, and engineers to deliver customizable, cost-effective PPE produced at his and other MakerSpaces.
UCD Institute for Discovery
O'Brien Centre for Science, Belfield, Dublin, Ireland. E: discovery@ucd.ie | Location Map(opens in a new window)www.ucd.ie/discovery