Older adults are increasingly adopting commercially available smart speakers like Amazon Echo or Google Home. In my past work, I have investigated older individuals’ current usage, perceptions, and preferences around using voice technologies. Informed by this work, in my current work, I design, build and evaluate end-user personalized voice technologies to support aging in place.

Publications: TOCHI'20, CSCW'19

Although participatory design is a common approach to include older adults in technology design, there are challenges around some older individuals visualizing technological feasibilities in open ended design sessions or individuals thinking about the needs of other older people. By developing novel co-design approaches, I investigate best practices around configuring design sessions with older adults e.g., working in one-one sessions vs working in groups with older adults, choosing materials to use in design activities, appropriate probes and tools for diary studies etc.

Publications: CHI'20

I conducted a content analysis of online product reviews mentioning use by people with disabilities and conducted interviews with people with visual impairments. This work identified that although accessibility challenges exist (e.g., discoverability of voice features, remembering specific commands), there are some benefits of voice interaction for people with disabilities including improved independence, along with unexpected uses of the voice assistant towards supporting caregivers or speech therapy.

Publications: CHI'18

We explored the potential of using haptic feedback on the wrist for directional hand guide. I conducted a within-subject controlled experiment with a single experimental factor of Number of Motors (4 or 8) with 14 visually impaired participants. I recruited and conducted in-lab user studies with visually impaired screenreader users, and assisted in quantitative and qualitative analysis of the study data.

ASSETS'17