Cohort 2 student Sam James published a journal article via Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems entitled ‘Chronic Care in a Life Transition: Challenges and Opportunities for Artificial Intelligence to Support Young Adults With Type 1 Diabetes Moving to University’.
Sam had the following to say about his paper: ‘The paper uses data collected in one-to-one interviews with young adults in the UK who had recently experienced the move to university and were living with type 1 diabetes (T1D). From a thematic analysis of the interviews, findings were made about this life transition and its impact on T1D management. These focused on the changes in lifestyle and the changes in support network. The changes in lifestyle included changes to drinking habits, eating habits, sleeping habits, physical
activity habits and overall schedule. The changes to support network highlighted; the increased independence, parents’ role in T1D management, explaining T1D to people and the assistive roles
people at university fill. From these findings, several opportunities and challenges for technology during the transition to university are discussed, with a focus on artificial intelligence and the closedloop system. These include automated personalisation, customisation, data limitations, the limitations of artificial intelligence in unusual scenarios and the potential of human-centred based design solutions. The paper then considers the wider implication of these findings for other chronic conditions and suggests the need for further research to allow personalised solutions to develop that consider the problems caused by life transitions.
I was first author on the paper and performed the majority of work across the process with input from my supervisors, who made up the remaining authors. The work I did included the project setup (exploring the research space and gaining ethical approval for the study), data collection (participant recruitment, online interviews and transcribing them), data analysis (thematic analysis)
and write-up (selecting the novel parts of the analysis and creating a paper to explain them).
The work aims to highlight the difficulties that life transitions cause in chronic condition management and to trigger more research into technology during these periods. This hopefully will
lead to the design of management systems that can cope with the challenges of life transitions or increase awareness of times they may be less effective and why.’
Link to Paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3580901