ASSIST Director and Principal Investigator Veena Misra opened the day with a short presentation on the critical global health issues that ASSIST and other developers of biomedical wearables are working to solve, providing a framing context for the day’s discussions.
Representing several major corporations, multiple research universities, several large hospitals and key government agencies, participants started off with warm up activities including hands-on LEGO® prototyping and group role playing to analyze wearable medical device case studies. The rest of the morning and the afternoon was dedicated to small group discussions focusing on one of the eight key aspects of the impact biomedical devices can have on users and society.
With regular intervals to network and report each small group discussion to the whole group, attendees identified user-centered design, engaging proper stakeholders to carefully identify real problems, and ethics as critical issues to manage effectively, in addition to the 5 initially proposed: risk, regulation, safety, privacy, security and social acceptability.
Designed and led by Rider Foley, UVA, and Philip Asare, Bucknell University, the workshop provided trained facilitators for each small group discussion with the help of Jason Delborne, NCSU, Susan Hoffman, UVA, and Tolu Odumosu, UVA. Dr. Foley and Dr. Asare are working with the 6 students from UVA and Bucknell who transcribed the workshop to create a summary of the day’s proceedings and recommendations for next steps. We’d like to thank those students for all their hard work so far and yet to come:
- Loriana Demirciyan, Bucknell University
- Caitlin Mahoney, Bucknell University
- Rachel Richardson, University of Virginia
- Emma Price, University of Virginia
- Victoria Lindsey, University of Virginia
- Yan Zhuang, University of Virginia
This workshop is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. We appreciate the NSF’s support, which made it possible to gather a large group of hardworking people from a diverse set of backgrounds to participate in these important discussions about responsibly harnessing the vast potential of wearable biomedical devices.