Daniel Epstein

About

Daniel Epstein is a faculty member at the Connected Learning Lab, where he applies Human-Computer Interaction methods to study personal tracking technology. His research focuses on how these tools can better acknowledge and account for the realities of everyday life. Through his work, he contributes recommendations on designing tracking tools that are more inclusive of people's identities, environments, and abilities.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Applied psychology
• Psychology
• Social Science
• Internet privacy
• Sociology
• Medicine
• Social psychology
• Psychiatry

Selected publications

• Mapping and Taking Stock of the Personal Informatics Literature

  Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies · 2020 · 207 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  The research community on the study and design of systems for personal informatics has grown over the past decade. To take stock of what the topics the field has studied and methods the field has used, we map and label 523 publications from ACM's library, IEEE Xplore, and PubMed. We surface that the literature has focused on studying and designing for health and wellness domains, an emphasis on understanding and overcoming barriers to data collection and reflection, and progressively fewer contr…

  DOI

• Understanding the Benefits and Challenges of Deploying Conversational AI Leveraging Large Language Models for Public Health Intervention

  2023 · 163 citations

  Recent large language models (LLMs) have advanced the quality of open-ended conversations with chatbots. Although LLM-driven chatbots have the potential to support public health interventions by monitoring populations at scale through empathetic interactions, their use in real-world settings is underexplored. We thus examine the case of CareCall, an open-domain chatbot that aims to support socially isolated individuals via check-up phone calls and monitoring by teleoperators. Through focus group…

  DOI

• Understanding People’s Use of and Perspectives on Mood-Tracking Apps: Interview Study

  JMIR Mental Health · 2021 · 91 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  BACKGROUND: Supporting mental health and wellness is of increasing interest due to a growing recognition of the prevalence and burden of mental health issues. Mood is a central aspect of mental health, and several technologies, especially mobile apps, have helped people track and understand it. However, despite formative work on and dissemination of mood-tracking apps, it is not well understood how mood-tracking apps used in real-world contexts might benefit people and what people hope to gain f…

  DOI

• Co-Designing Situated Displays for Family Co-Regulation with ADHD Children

  2024-05-11 · 25 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Family informatics often uses shared data dashboards to promote awareness of each other’s health-related behaviors. However, these interfaces often stop short of providing families with needed guidance around how to improve family functioning and health behaviors. We consider the needs of family co-regulation with ADHD children to understand how in-home displays can support family well-being. We conducted three co-design sessions with each of eight families with ADHD children who had used a smar…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Unpacking the Lived Experience of Collaborative Pregnancy Tracking

  2024-05-11 · 19 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Pregnancy brings physical, emotional, and economic challenges for expectant parent(s), close relatives, and friends. Existing technology support, including tracking technology, largely targets pregnant people and ignores other stakeholders. We therefore lack an understanding of how to approach designing collaborative pregnancy tracking technology. To understand how people collaborate around pregnancy tracking and wish to do so, we interviewed 13 pregnant people and 11 non-pregnant stakeholders i…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CRII: CHS: Examining a Multimodal Approach to Lowering the Burden of Food Journaling

  NSF · $175k · 2019–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Eliseo Berní Reategui

  20 shared

• Sean A. Munson

  14 shared

• James Fogarty

  University of Washington

  13 shared

• Eunkyung Jo

  University of California System

  10 shared

• Isis da Costa Pinho

  Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

  10 shared

• Nasser Assadi

  Regional Medical Center

  9 shared

• Shawn Kurian

  9 shared

• Chulou H Penales

  Nova Southeastern University

  9 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Computer Science & Engineering

  University of Washington

  2018

• B.S., Computer Science

  University of Virginia

  2012

Similar researchers at University of California, Irvine

• Mark Warschauerh-78
• Stephen Schuellerh-65
• Sean Youngh-48