Communication Technology & AAC

Postdoctoral Fellowship (ESRC funded): Promoting Stakeholder Engagement for Communication Technology

As part of an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship award, I developed a series of resources to aid assistive technologists, teachers and therapists in developing ways of using digital technology to support interaction involving children who cannot speak. The bite-size videos, project updates and researcher blog reflections are available via my researcher blog website smallspeaks.com

PhD Research Project (ESRC funded): Investigating Communication Involving Children with Severe Speech and Physical Impairments

My PhD research took a design oriented approach to investigate communication that involves children with severe speech impairments and their social partners. Using ethnographic methods, design methods and micro analysis, I investigated how children communicate in multimodal ways, and how technologies impact on this process. By focusing on interactions that involve existing AAC and interactions beyond technology use, I generated new design implications for technology and contributed new insights for involving ‘hard to reach’ children in design research. My PhD thesis is openly available via UCL Discovery

Mental Health & Parenting Interventions

From Role-Play to Situated Feedback: Re-envisioning Child Mental Health Promotion Interventions with Digital Technology

At King’s College London, in my role a Postdoctoral Research Associate on Dr Petr Slovak’s UKRI Future Leader’s Fellowship, I led on developing innovative approaches to parenting intervention delivery. The focus was on combining:

  • (i) qualitative research on the challenges faced by parents in existing programmes; with
  • (ii) a user-centred design process of envisioning new ways of supporting parents (and children) through scalable technology approaches.

I worked closely with Clinical Psychologists at South London and the Maudesley Hospital and colleagues at the national child mental health charity Place2Be to implement our project’s initial findings and support the delivery of parenting interventions in the NHS and charity sector.

Educational Technology & Learning

iRead – Personalised Reading Apps for Primary School Children

I was a postdoctoral researcher on the EU H2020 iRead project. iRead was a 4-year (2017-2020) project that aimed to develop personalised learning technologies to support reading skills. The designed technologies combine a diverse set of personalised learning applications and teaching tools for formative assessment. We focused on primary school children across Europe, learning to read and learning english as a foreign language including children with dyslexia who are at risk of exclusion from their education. The project comprised 15 partners from across industry and education in 8 European countries and was organised into three strands: innovation, design and evaluation, with different expected outcomes and stakeholders. Further info available via iRead Project Website

Enhancing Teacher Decision Making for Children with Autism using Machine Learning

I worked as a researcher on a UCL IOE Collaborative Seed Funded Scheme (PI: Dr. Joseph Mintz, UCL IOE). The project explored how AI algorithms can help teachers make decisions in the classroom about the effective inclusion of children with autism. The focus was on applying machine learning to the analysis of strategies that teachers could use day-to-day in the classroom, helping teachers understand which strategies are effective and which are not.

Research Methods & Ethics

Supporting Children’s Participation in Research: Ethics & Consent

Undertaking ethical research with children is an ongoing process of reflection and refinement of practices. Led by Dr Laura Benton (UCL) and together with Julia Truscott (CYRA service) and Minna Nygren (UCL), we held a knowledge Exchange workshop for researchers and postgraduate students to increase awareness and understanding of consent practices when researching with diverse groups of children. Further info here