April 7, 2025
April 7, 2025
1:00 – 3:00 pm Eastern
via Zoom
About the Tutorial: In this tutorial, we explore approaches for engaging traditionally under-represented populations in co-designing the very digital health tools meant to benefit them. Too often digital health researchers designing for marginalized communities do not include their intended users in early design work, resulting in ineffective interventions plagued by low engagement and adherence, poor outcomes, and, at times, intervention exacerbated health disparities. Participatory design—centers marginalized community members as experts by experience and empowers them to take an active role in designing tools that support the health topics they identify as most relevant to themselves and their communities. We provide an overview of participatory design practices that empower participants with a strong emphasis on co-design at the initial stages of design and development. We introduce a variety of novel participatory design workshop methods such as PhotoVoice and Modular Storyboards. We also use this opportunity to share our newest PD method, Care Pathways—a novel inspiration card game for co-designing digital mental health tools with Black women and Clinicians. We address practical challenges that often arise during recruitment, workshop planning, and facilitation and grapple with nuanced topics such as mitigating technosolutionism, disseminating findings back to the community, and running workshops with two types of key stakeholders.
About the Presenters: Dr. Terika McCall is an Assistant Professor in the Biostatistics Department (Health Informatics Division) at the Yale School of Public Health, secondary faculty at the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Biomedical Informatics & Data Science, and Director of the Consumer Health Informatics Lab (CHIL) at Yale. Dr. McCall’s research interests focus on reducing disparities in mental health service access and use through technology. Specifically, she examines the use of telehealth modalities to deliver mental health services and resources to communities that are underserved. Dr. McCall’s expertise is in user-centered design and usability testing of digital health tools. She has experience leading multidisciplinary teams in industry and academia in the development of digital health tools and currently teaches a course on the topic.
Dr. Teresa Kenyon O’Leary is a NIH National Library of Medicine Postdoctoral Fellow in the Biostatistics Department (Health Informatics Division) at the Yale School of Public Health. Dr. O’Leary adopts a socio-ecological and whole-person care approach to her work where she conducts in-depth fieldwork to design, develop, and evaluate digital mental health tools with older adults and historically marginalized communities. Her research focuses on community-engaged health informatics, stigma-reduction, mental wellness, spiritual care, and digital health equity. She has experience developing novel participatory design methodologies to democratize health innovations for all and serves in this capacity as a consultant across a variety of digital health projects.