✉️ woosuk [dot] seo [at] yale.edu
I am a Postdoctoral Associate in Human Factors Engineering at the Yale School of Medicine.
My research interests include health communication and human-computer interaction. As a design researcher,
I am particularly interested in designing technologies that support communication and collaboration among patients, informal caregivers, and healthcare providers.
I completed my Ph.D. in Information at the University of Michigan in 2025 and my B.S. in Informatics at the University of Washington in 2017.
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09/2025 🎉 I joined Yale School of Medicine as a postdoctoral associate in human factors engineering! I will work with Dr.Melnick.
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06/2025 🎓 I defended my dissertation! "Designing an AI Chatbot to Support Child–Parent–Provider Communication in Pediatric Cancer Care"
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04/2025 📍 I attended CHI'25 in Yokohama and presented our paper! "Enhancing Pediatric Communication: The Role of an AI-Driven Chatbot in Facilitating Child-Parent-Provider Interaction"
Research Projects
Supporting communication between child patients, their parental caregivers, and healthcare providers in pediatric cancer care
In pediatric care, effective communication between child patients, their parental caregivers, and healthcare providers is critical for promoting positive health outcomes. However, caring for children requires more effort and time than for adult patients. Thus, we aim to present design implications for technology to support communication among the three stakeholders by exploring their roles, responsibilities, and communication practices.
Publication: CSCW'19, CHI'20, CHI'21(Video), CSCW'21, CHI'25
Designing Patient- and Provider-centered Interventions for Emergency Care: Participatory Design Study
Emergency departments (EDs) are complex and fast-paced clinical settings where diagnoses must be made under constraints of time, information, and resources. This study aims to identify the challenges faced by frontline ED healthcare providers and patients during the diagnostic process. It also seeks to engage them in the co-design of technological interventions to improve diagnostic excellence.
Publication: JMIR (Patient, Provider)
* Designing an LLM-powered chatbot that guides children to identify and share their emotions
* Conducted this work as a research intern at NAVER Cloud AI Lab
Children typically learn to identify and express emotions by sharing their stories and feelings with others, particularly their families. However, it is challenging for parents or siblings to communicate emotionally with children since children are still developing their communication skills. We present ChaCha, a chatbot that encourages and guides children to share personal events and emotions. ChaCha combines a state machine and large language models (LLMs) to keep the dialogue on track while carrying on free-form conversations. (Project Website)
Understanding content creators with visual impairments
on YouTube & Twitch
Although previous studies outlined various implications to support people with visual impairments (PVI) for interacting with visual content (e.g., images, videos) and engaging with activities on social media platforms, they have not extensively examined PVI's experience in creating visual content. Thus, we aim to explore how PVI create and upload videos to YouTube or stream live videos to Twitch, and how they interact with other users through their videos.
Publication: ASSETS'17, TVX'18, UAIS'20, CSCW'21
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Exploring art therapists' perceptions and needs for AI-assisted assessment tools
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been widely used to assist art therapists with
artwork assessments by providing objective information. However, using AI-assisted tools in online art therapy is still under-examined. We created a prototype of an AI-assisted tool for online therapy and conducted usability testing with art therapists to understand their acceptance and concerns about the prototype
Publication: ECSCW'22
Selected Publications
Seo, W., Kim, Y. H., Kim, J. E., Fan, M. T., Ackerman, M. S., Choi, S. W., & Park, S. Y. (2025, April). Enhancing Pediatric Communication: The Role of an AI-Driven Chatbot in Facilitating Child-Parent-Provider Interaction. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-16).
Seo, W., Yang, C., & Kim, Y. H. (2024, May). Chacha: leveraging large language models to prompt children to share their emotions about personal events. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-20).
Seo, W., Buyuktur, A. G., Choi, S. W., Sedig, L., & Park, S. Y. (2021). Challenges in the Parent-Child Communication of Health-related Information in Pediatric Cancer Care. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5(CSCW1), 1-24.
Seo, W., Buyuktur, A. G., Verma, S., Kim, H., Choi, S. W., Sedig, L., & Park, S. Y. (2021, May). Learning from Healthcare Providers’ Strategies: Designing Technology to Support Effective Child Patient-Provider Communication. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-15).
Park, S. Y., Seo, W., Berry, A. B., Kim, H., Verma, S., Choi, S. W., & Buyuktur, A. G. (2020, April). Learning from Positive Adaptations of Pediatric Cancer Patients to Design Health Technologies. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-12)
Seo, W., Berry, A. B., Bhagane, P., Choi, S. W., Buyuktur, A. G., & Park, S. Y. (2019). Balancing Tensions between Caregiving and Parenting Responsibilities in Pediatric Patient Care. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 3(CSCW), 1-24.
A full list of publications is available on my Google Scholar Profile