My research examines how social dynamics of cooperation, trust, inequality, and privacy shape the use and impact of digital technologies. While new technologies, from electronic health records and patient portals to location tracking apps and smart home Internet of Things, offer potential to improve health and other aspects of life across populations, they may also produce unintended harms ─ exacerbating health disparities, undermining privacy or creating information security risks. My work examines how such potential consequences intersect with social behavior, relationships and institutions to affect individual and collective outcomes. I seek to identify practices, programs, and policies to limit harms while achieving the benefits of new digital technologies for all.
Please describe one or two of your most interesting projects.
My work is often in collaboration with computer scientists and engineers to consider the social implications of new technologies in society, including not only how they are used by how they interact with existing social behavior, relationships, organizations and institutions. How technology interacts with social dynamics can lead to many unexpected outcomes both for the technology use and impact, but also for how social behavior and relationships may change over time. For example, in a recent paper, my colleague and I analyze how potential regulatory changes to the accessibility of patient health information could disrupt institutions in healthcare. We show how technological changes create openings to challenge the existing meaning and management of information within established institutions in health care – through professional specialty organizations and health systems and regulatory practices – such that fundamental aspects of health care may be disrupted. Such disruptions offer both opportunities for major improvements to health, but also create the possibility for undermining trust and destabilizing established health care practice.
In another project as part of the NSF-funded SPLICE project, my colleagues and I consider how new services related to repairs of Internet of Things (IoT) systems – what we call a “HandyTech,” may work in a future of “smart homes.” Using a vignette-based, multi-factorial survey with a nationally representative sample of adults in the United States, we find that some demographic groups are more willing than others to use a HandyTech (e.g., younger age groups, those with children in the home). Current ownership of more types of smart devices increases willingness to use a HandyTech, while greater concerns over general IoT privacy decreases willingness to use a HandyTech. Device-specific perceptions also mattered, such that perceived urgency to fix the device, such as for a health-related device, strongly influences willingness to use a HandyTech.