Designing Narrative Healthcare Technologies

A friend has just been diagnosed with a tumor and needs a biopsy. He’s afraid, quiet, and wide-eyed thinking of the future of his health, and projecting possible outcomes into all realms of his life. Questions come to mind: What do you say? In the moment after diagnosis, is providing a momentary diversion by friends or a doctor specifying future medical procedures most productive? Can narrative interactions between patients, doctors, and families prime for the best medical outcomes, suppress the need for medications, and help the patient make personally sound medical decisions? Realistically, what technologies and research methods might help us understand these human interactions, and harness them to boost treatment efficacy?

Narrative practice has a long history in heath care. The structure of medical knowledge, patient doctor encounters; placebo and nocebo effects; and, psychotherapeutic treatments employ narrative for medical decision-making and treatment. In this talk, we will discuss a new research methodology I developed for designing narrative healthcare technologies. The methodology scaffolds and integrates knowledge across clinical practice, computer science, and neuroscience to successfully leverage cognitive process and patient narrative histories to promote health. My current research endeavor is designing and implementing a talk therapy software engine to assist people suffering from pain and anxiety. The goals of the work are to shift the paradigm of healthcare technology from information delivery to treatment delivery; address the growing shortage of healthcare workers; and to promote broad interdisciplinary research collaborations. Most emphatically, the goal is to help people who suffer from pain and anxiety in everyday life.