Elaine Czech, University of Bristol

Topic: Adopting and Adapting Technologies to Support Social Care
Location: In Person 1.7S Seminar Room 2, Geographical Sciences (University of Bristol only) & Online
Date: September 30th, 2025 14:00-15:00 GMT

Abstract: In light of the switch over from analogue telephone to digital phones to allow universal access to full fibre or gigabit-capable broadband this year (visit https://digitalphoneswitchover.com/ for more information), there is significant potential for commercial smart home technologies like Alexa and Roomba to help improve social care. Adoption and appropriation of commercial technologies is often preferable since they are familiar devices that do not look like potentially stigmatising “health” or “accessibility” specific devices. However, there is a lack of evidence on how these devices help, or hinder care. In this talk, Dr. Czech will discuss two 3-month long studies which examined how two different commercial technologies with multiple access modes (e.g., touch, sight, and voice) supported households in which at least one resident was a social care recipient: the Amazon Echo Show 8 (not designed for care) and a passive sensor system (designed for monitoring care at a distance). While these technologies could help some participants, we found that in both cases, issues arose because the implementation of the devices did not account for or support the collaborative care efforts already existing in the care ecosystem.

Bio: Elaine Czech is a Research Associate working with Aisling O’Kane and Kenton O’Hara on the TORUS research program to co-design a technological system to monitor and measure Parkinson’s disease symptoms. Elaine has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bristol, masters in Media Design from Keio University, and a bachelors in Art and Design from the University of Michigan. She considers herself to be a design researcher focussed on grounding design work in academic literature, social theory, and community-based participatory design work. She is particularly interested in designing technologies to positively support social interdependencies between users.

Related work:

Elaine Czech, Ewan Soubutts, Rachel Eardley, and Aisling Ann O’Kane. 2023. Independence for Whom? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Onboarding a Home Health Monitoring System for Older Adult Care. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 330, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580733
Elaine Czech, Ewan Soubutts, Ian Craddock, and Aisling Ann O’Kane. 2025. Understanding the Multimodal Voice Assistant as an Informal and Social Care Support Tool in the UK. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI ’25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 61, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1145/3719160.3736605