Workers with intellectual and developmental disability often encounter challenges in professional workplaces, including barriers to effective task performance and equitable participation. Social Collaborative Robots (SCRs) present a promising opportunity to foster inclusive work environments by offering ability-based support tailored to individual strengths. This research aims to explores how SCRs can be leveraged at workplaces to assist workers with intellectual and developmental disability and share responsibilities carried by people in their employment support networks. Preliminary findings from workplace observations and interviews reveal that workers with intellectual and developmental disability can partake in variety of work activities and can benefit from assistive technologies that align with their cognitive abilities and job requirements, ultimately enhancing their task performance and workplace inclusion.
Aphasia, which is a language disorder that affects a person's ability to communicate, can present profound challenges in one's daily life. Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) technology can support people with aphasia (PWA) in navigating such challenges, but often overlooks personalized comunication needs. End-user programming, which allows a user to develop and use their own custom programs, presents a promising solution where people with aphasia can create their own solutions based on their personal communication needs. With the advent of generative AI such as large language models (LLMs) to augment PWA communication, my dissertation investigates how end-user programming can be designed so that PWA can create and customize AI-driven tools to support their communication. I center my research on two research goals. First, by conducting co-design workshops and semi-structured interviews, I will investigate how end-user programming can be accessible for PWA, and its usefulness in various communication settings grounded in PWA's lived experiences. Then, I aim to understand the feasibility of real-world designs by building and evaluating prototypes based on the knowledge gained from the first research goal. This research aims to understand how empowering PWA in creating their own tools can promote conversational agency in AI-driven communication tools.
Actively exercising and spectating sport are popular leisure activities, but have yet to become more accessible. While the SportsHCI research community is growing, technology is primarily researched for the non-disabled body. Further, accessibility often ends at the practical inclusion without aiming for equitable experiences. My PhD project orients towards endeavours in SportsHCI and addresses both active and passive engagement in sport. Through two case studies, I explore the accessibility of sports technology, i.e., study cycling and interactive seat plans, and provide a comprehensive account that considers both facets. Grounded in participatory methods, my research involves exploratory and qualitative methods that lay the foundation for the final prototypes of sports technology for people with reduced mobility.
My research interests are in human-computer interaction, accessibility, and creativity. My goal is to bring accessibility to the forefront of technology, enabling everyone to meet their needs and engage in a creative practice. Over the past year (2024–2025), I conducted research grounded in Crip Technoscience [1] to investigate how disabled artists repurpose technology to express identity and creativity rather than to "fix" disability. This work culminated in a paper, Expanding Norms, Negotiating Bodies: How Artists with Disabilities Perceive and Use Creative Tools [2], which was accepted to the ASSETS 2025 Conference. With the support of the SIGACCESS Travel Award, I was able to travel to Denver, Colorado, and attend the 2025 ASSETS conference in person. The travel grant also funded me to take part in the ASSETS 2025 Participant Recruitment in Accessibility Research Workshop.
Hearing parents of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children often struggle to provide meaningful sign input while simultaneously learning a new language. This summary includes a series of interactive systems to support accessible and engaging communication for parent-child interaction. Building on the Tabletop Interactive Play System (TIPS), a real-time ASL communication technology, my prior work has examined users' perceptions of system usefulness and autonomy. An ongoing study investigates four ASL support strategies, ranging from manual sign lookup to sentence translation and real-time sign recommendations, to examine their effects on communication effectiveness and user engagement in parent-child interaction. Extending this foundation, this summary proposes a research direction that explores a personalized recommendation model that adapts sign suggestions based on user preference and interaction history. Additionally, I introduce RhymASL, an interactive system that leverages ASL phonological features to support rhyming ASL stories creation that foster playful parent-child interaction. Across these efforts, my research aims to advance the design of assistive communication technologies that are responsive to diverse communicative needs and support meaningful interaction.
