This project will explore the roles human-computer interaction can play in helping non-experts to understand and engage with their personal genomic information. Recent years are seeing a dramatic growth in the scale and scope of personal genomic information that is available to non-experts, often online and in interactive forms. As a result, individuals are confronted with unprecedented amounts of sensitive and often complex information about themselves, which influences their decisions, emotional states and well-being. Consequently, questions about how people make sense of and engage with their personal genomic information, and how comfortable they feel about sharing it in order to advance scientific and biomedical research, are not only of paramount importance for life sciences researchers and policy makers, but also a pressing issue for human-computer interaction researchers.
Because the technology that enables lay people to interact with such information is new, there is little research on it. Given the tremendous growth in the scale and scope of genomic information available to non-experts, this work has the potential to make an impact on human-computer interaction theory and practice by investigating fundamental issues concerning non-expert interaction with complex scientific information and the impact of user interface design interventions on learning from, and sharing of, personal genomic information. Advances in five areas will be sought: (1) Functional requirements for supporting meaningful engagement of non-experts with personal genomic information; (2) Fundamental knowledge of how user interface design interventions impact users' willingness to share personal genomic data; (3) Novel interaction techniques for presenting and exploring rich, complex, and highly personalized data sets by non-experts; (4) Design guidelines for effective interaction with personal genomic information, and (5) Methodology for evaluating the effectiveness of techniques for interaction with personal genomic information.
