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Research at the intersection of human-computer interaction (HCI) and health is increasingly done by collaborative cross-disciplinary teams. The need for cross-disciplinary teams arises from the interdisciplinary nature of the work itself—with the need for expertise in a health discipline, experimental design, statistics, and computer science, in addition to HCI. This work can also increase innovation, transfer of knowledge across fields, and have a higher impact on communities. To succeed at a collaborative project, researchers must effectively form and maintain a team that has the right expertise, integrate research perspectives and work practices, align individual and team goals, and secure funding to support the research. However, successfully operating as a team has been challenging for HCI researchers, and can be limited due to a lack of training, shared vocabularies, lack of institutional incentives, support from funding agencies, and more; which significantly inhibits their impact. This workshop aims to draw on the wealth of individual experiences in health project team collaboration across the CHI community and beyond. By bringing together different stakeholders involved in HCI health research, together, we will identify needs experienced during interdisciplinary HCI and health collaborations. We will identify existing practices and success stories for supporting team collaboration and increasing HCI capacity in health research. We aim for participants to leave our workshop with a toolbox of methods to tackle future team challenges, a community of peers who can strive for more effective teamwork, and feeling positioned to make the health impact they wish to see through their work. 

Background Developers, designers, and researchers use rapid prototyping methods to project the adoption and acceptability of their health intervention technology (HIT) before the technology becomes mature enough to be deployed. Although these methods are useful for gathering feedback that advances the development of HITs, they rarely provide usable evidence that can contribute to our broader understanding of HITs. Objective In this research, we aim to develop and demonstrate a variation of vignette testing that supports developers and designers in evaluating early-stage HIT designs while generating usable evidence for the broader research community. Methods We proposed a method called health concept surveying for untangling the causal relationships that people develop around conceptual HITs. In health concept surveying, investigators gather reactions to design concepts through a scenario-based survey instrument. As the investigator manipulates characteristics related to their HIT, the survey instrument also measures proximal cognitive factors according to a health behavior change model to project how HIT design decisions may affect the adoption and acceptability of an HIT. Responses to the survey instrument were analyzed using path analysis to untangle the causal effects of these factors on the outcome variables. Results We demonstrated health concept surveying in 3 case studies of sensor-based health-screening apps. Our first study (N=54) showed that a wait time incentive could influence more people to go see a dermatologist after a positive test for skin cancer. Our second study (N=54), evaluating a similar application design, showed that although visual explanations of algorithmic decisions could increase participant trust in negative test results, the trust would not have been enough to affect people’s decision-making. Our third study (N=263) showed that people might prioritize test specificity or sensitivity depending on the nature of the medical condition. Conclusions Beyond the findings from our 3 case studies, our research uses the framing of the Health Belief Model to elicit and understand the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that may affect the adoption and acceptability of an HIT without having to build a working prototype. We have made our survey instrument publicly available so that others can leverage it for their own investigations.