Cycles of Care: Bridging Medicine, Technology, Sociology, and Intersectional Design in Digital Women’s Health – A Workshop Series

Session 2: Recruitment of Underrepresented & Vulnerable Participants: Why, What, How?

📅 Thursday, 30 April 2026 – 15.00 – 19.00h

A Feminist Autoethnographic Critique of Technology and Research on Gender-Based Violence.
Nimra Ahmed, MSc, Fast-track PhD Student, University of Zurich

This keynote, based on the award-winning CHI 2026 paper by the same name (authored by Nimra Ahmed, Angelika Strohmayer, and Elaine Huang), calls for more sustainable and community‑led HCI approaches to supporting people affected by gender‑based violence, particularly forced marriage. Drawing on personal and research reflections, the paper highlights how digital interventions often fall short: Ending at prototypes, prioritizing legal solutions too early, or reinforcing harmful labels.

Designing gender-sensitive recruitment for health research
Abdelilah Hamamou, PhD Candidate, Radboud university medical center (Radboudumc), Department of Primary and Community Care, Unit Gender in Primary and Transmural Care

This keynote will explore how recruitment shapes who becomes visible in health research and whose experiences remain underrepresented in evidence, innovation, and care. Drawing on examples from gender-sensitive research in rheumatic diseases, the talk will discuss how language, trust, digital access, clinical pathways, and community engagement influence participation. It will highlight practical strategies for recruiting underrepresented groups, including the use of multi-channel recruitment, clearer communication, clinician and patient organisation involvement, and real-time monitoring of who is still missing. The keynote will invite participants to view recruitment not only as a logistical step, but as an ethical, methodological, and social design decision that is central to inclusive and valid health research.

Session 3: Inclusive Study Designs and Analysis Methods

📅 Wednesday, 20 May March 2026 – 17.00 – 20.00h

End-to-End Research to Foster Holistic Menstrual Health Sensemaking
Georgianna (Blue) Lin, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia University

This keynote presents an end-to-end research approach to support holistic menstrual health sensemaking from integrating data collection, analysis, to real-world use. Drawing on mixed-methods work spanning qualitative research, statistical and machine learning approaches, and system deployment, the talk examines how multimodal data, including wearable sensing, can be leveraged to support users in making sense of complex, cyclical health data and translating insights into informed action. Framed within an intersectional perspective on sex and gender, this work emphasizes the importance of inclusive study design and analytical methods that account for diverse bodies and lived experiences. It also explores how menstrual-relevant signals can be derived from general-purpose sensing infrastructures, expanding access to menstrual health insights.

Beyond Interfaces: Designing Health Technologies in Living Ecologies

Anupriya Tuli, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Interaction Design Team, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

This keynote will shift focus away from the interfaces, inviting us to look beyond screens and features into the messy realities where health technologies quietly live and breathe. It asks the audience to see these technologies not as isolated tools, but as part of a living, shifting ecology woven through people, organizations, infrastructures, culture, and everyday practices of care. Rather than smoothing over complexity, the talk centres on the tensions of designing within such entangled systems. It introduces the Socio-Ecological Canvas as a visual vocabulary to trace how design decisions are shaped by, ripple across, and in turn shape multiple layers of ecological influence. 

At its heart, the keynote is an invitation. To pause. To notice the ecologies we design within and for. And to imagine, together, not only the aspired versions of existing realities but also realities that do not exist yet.

Sustainability in Systems Change Work: improving care for mothers in recovery from addictions
Prof. Dr. Angelika Strohmayer, Design Feminisms Research Group, School of Design, Arts, and Creative Industries, Northumbria University

In this talk, Dr Strohmayer will reflect on her community-based and design-led research to improve care ecosystems with mothers in recovery from addiction. She will explore how this programme of work has tried to balance long-term systems change with immediately implementable changes in practice across public health, social care, recovery, and women’s support services. Drawing together findings from this ongoing work, Dr Strohmayer will use this as an example to reflect on (1) what ‘sustainability’ in systems change work can be when working with communities and (2) how this work can lead to collaborative, cross-sector working to craft hopeful imaginaries of not only the care that is needed for women to survive, but also to blossom.