Jina Huh-Yoo, PhD

I am an Assistant Professor at Drexel University in the College of Computing and Informatics. My research areas include human-centered computing, computer supported collaborative work, and health informatics. I lead the Health and Happiness Design Lab (H2D Lab) (website is under construction).

My current research projects include using conversational agent and other mobile and web-based technologies to improve health in everyday settings. I also study how various stakeholders, including users, Institutional Review Board, researchers, and policy makers perceive about what is sensitive personal information, and how this information should be managed in the context of digital technology use. I have been PI of NSF and NIH funded projects in improving information quality of online health communities and designing and evaluating acoustic-sensor based awareness system for family health. I serve as Steering Committee for ACM CSCW (2019-), Committee on Human Research at American Psychological Association (2020-2022), Best Paper Nomination Committee for CHI, and program committee for ACM CHI, AMIA, and IEEE Pervasive Health conferences. Here’s my CV (Updated 2/3/2020).

Health and Happiness Design Lab: Featured projects

Conversational Agents for health and wellness

Wizard-of-Oz prototype of TAMI, a Raspberry Pi platform without Internet access for possible opportunity to disseminate to low-resource communities. However, speech-to-text technology with high performance require high processing power and internet bandwidth. In this phase of feasibility testing, TAMI is controlled by the researcher as the participants talk with TAMI.

We are developing and evaluating an in-house conversational agents (CAs) for various health support contexts and clinical approaches.

Examples include family's healthy eating using Motivational Interviewing (See left) and emerging adult's risky behavior using art therapy.

With these contexts as testbed examples, we investigate theoretical understanding of trust in human-agent interaction, design requirements of CAs, and users' tailoring ability of these agents to address machine learning biases.

Digital research ethics and multi-stakeholder data management

We examine how various stakeholders of digital data--researchers, human subjects, users, and IRB staff--perceive sensitivity of information and how the information should be shared and handled. The outcome of the project would be to generate tools, policies, and guidelines for how digital data should be handled, how consent should be designed and acquired, and what educational training programs are needed.

Healthy aging and technology
We have multiple exciting projects happening in collaboration with Dr. DiMaria with the Cell2Society project funded by Drexel's DARE program and Dr. Demiris' group at UPenn and his research on managing mental health of the caregivers of older adults.

Study of clinical mental health support seeking behavior by analyzing social media video sharing
The aim is to understand and help clinical support seeking behavior on mental health through the study of emerging adults video sharing activities on social media.

Featured papers

FamilyLog: Monitoring Family Mealtime Activities by Mobile Devices July 12, 2019

Paper Presents empirical evaluation of using lightweight signal features from a set of complex activities during the meal (e.g., clattering sound, arm gestures of eating, human voice, TV sound) and fusing built-in sensor data of multiple mobile devices available in a family with a CRFs-based classifier. Abstract. Monitoring the family mealtime activities enables the analysis […]

Consumer Health Informatics Adoption among Underserved Populations: Thinking beyond the Digital Divide October 21, 2018

Paper Systematic review of facilitators and barriers to underserved populations’ consumer health technology adoption Objectives: Underserved populations can benefit from consumer health informatics (CHI) that promotes self-management at a lower cost. However, prior literature suggested that the digital divide and low motivation constituted barriers to CHI adoption. Despite increased Internet use, underserved populations continue to […]

Toward Predicting Social Support Needs in Online Health Social Networks May 23, 2017

Identified the features critical for predicting social support needs in online health communities. Background: While online health social networks (OHSNs) serve as an effective platform for patients to fulfill their various social support needs, predicting the needs of users and providing tailored information remains a challenge. Objective: The objective of this study is to discriminate […]

Increase in Contralateral Prophylactic Mastectomy Conversation Online Unrelated to Decision-Making May 19, 2017

The paper investigated whether conversations on online breast cancer community contribute to people choosing an aggressive, higher risk surgery. Abstract Background: The increased uptake of contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM) among breast cancer patients remains poorly understood. We hypothesized that the increased rate of CPM is represented in conversations on an online breast cancer community and […]

FamilyLog: A Mobile System for Monitoring Family Mealtime Activities May 19, 2017

This paper presents evaluation of the FamilyLog system with 37 subjects from 8 families. The system automatically detects activities during the mealtime, including occurrence and duration of meal, conversations, participants, and TV viewing using acoustic data from phones and smartwatches. [paper] Title FamilyLog: A Mobile System for Monitoring Family Mealtime Activities Abstract Research has shown […]

Travel and meetings

Mar 20-21, 2020. American Psychological Association Committee Meeting on Human Research. Washington D.C.

Jan 6-7, 2020. NSF SCH PI meeting. Alexandria, VA

Nov 20, 2019. PRVACI Research Group, NYU Information Law Institute. NYC, NY

Nov 10-13, 2019. CSCW 2019. Austin, TX

Aug 19-20, 2019. PRVACI Symposium 2019. Berkeley, CA

June 23-28, 2019. HCIC 2019. Parajo Dunes, Watsonville, CA

February 27, 2019. NYU Langone Medical Center, Healthcare Innovation Bridging Research, Informatics, and Design Lab (HiBRID Lab). Research talk

February 20-22, 2019. Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI. Department of Media and Information.

February 7, 2019. Drexel University, College of Computing and Informatics.

January 31, 2019. New Jersey Institute of Technology, Department of Informatics. Newark, NJ.

January 28, 2019. Montclair State University, Department of Computer Science. Montclair, NJ.

January 22-23, 2019. Michigan State University, MI845 class lecture.

January 11, 2019. Columbia University, External committee, Dissertation Defense--Drashko Nakikj.

December 17, 2018. Dataminr, Inc. NYC, NY. Research talk: "People, processes, and design"

September 17-18, 2018. NSF Smart and Connected Health PI meeting

May 15, 2018. Washington DC. National Science Foundation. CISE CAREER Workshop

March 21-22, 2017. Boston, MA. NSF Smart and Connected Health meeting.

March 20, 2017. Boston, MA. "Closing the methodological loop in biomedical informatics research." Special seminar talk. Harvard Medical School Division of Preventive Medicine.