Ravi Karkar

Contact: rkarkar@umass.edu
Office: LGRC A351B

Current PhD Students:

Abhay Sheel Anand (co-advised with Deepak Ganesan)
Itir Sayar (co-advised with VP Nguyen)
Sabrina Zaman Ishita
Sidharth Kaliappan

I am an Assistant Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I co-direct the Health Tech for the People (HT4P) initiative and am part of the stakeholder engagement core of MassAITC.

My research focuses on human-centered approaches to develop tools that assist people in collecting, interacting with, and using novel health data to improve human well-being through personalized insights and recommendations. I adopt a holistic approach focusing on end-to-end design that understands the individual, their environments, and their contexts.

My research's long-term goal is to empower people to better understand and partake in their own health and well-being through collecting and interacting with novel health data streams.

In the past I have developed tools to support chronic care for conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), cirrhosis, migraine, and depression. More recently, I am interested in:

Developing novel tools to support better understanding and management of conditions such as mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease, stress, and urinary incontinence.
Understanding the ethics of health technology design. Look at my work with HT4P.
Developing an understanding of the role of design research in informing clinical practice (connecting HCI with implementation science).

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Washington. I am a 2024 STRIDE faculty fellow, 2024 PIT faculty fellow, and 2023 mHealth Training Institute fellow. I am a recipient of the Three-Sixty Fellowship for Computer Science and Engineering and numerous travel grants to present my research at premier conferences. My research has been recognized by CHI and DIS, and I have organized cross-disciplinary panels and discussions around tools for self-tracking at ICTD and QSC.

I am happy to talk with folks about my prior work:

Supporting collaborative care management of patients with cancer and depression by integrating care managers, oncologists, psychiatrists, and administrators to treat depression in primary care settings.
Enabling self-experimentation (n-of-1 trials) among people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) to identify their individualized food-based triggers.
Introducing a new form of self-monitoring in people with end-stage liver disease enabling them to better understand their chronic condition.

Select Publications

See my Google Scholar for a complete publication list.

Deploying and Examining Beacon for At-Home Patient Self-Monitoring with Critical Flicker Frequency

Richard Li, Philip Vutien, Sabrina Omer, Michael Yacoub, George N Ioannou, Ravi Karkar, Sean A Munson, and James Fogarty

CHI 2025 • PDF forthcomig

SCOPE: Examining Technology-Enhanced Collaborative Care Management of Depression
in the Cancer Setting

Anant Mittal, Tae E. Jones, Ravi Karkar, Jina Suh, Spencer Williams, Yihao Zheng,
Lydia M. Andris, Nicole Bates, Amy M. Bauer, Ty W. Lostuter, Jesse R. Fann, James Fogarty,
and Gary Hsieh

CSCW 2025 • PDF

AI vs. Humans for Online Support: Comparing the Language of Responses from LLMs and Online Communities of Alzheimer’s Disease

Koustuv Saha, Yoshee Jain, Chunyu Liu, Sidharth Kaliappan, and Ravi Karkar

ACM Health 2025 • PDF • Source

Hardware-Assisted Privacy-Preserving Multi-Channel EEG Computational Headwear

Abdul Aziz*, Bhawana Chhaglani*, Amirmohammad Radmehr, Joseph Collins, Jeremy Gummeson, Sunghoon Ivan Lee, Ravi Karkar, and Phuc Nguyen (* = co-first authors)

IEEE-BSN 2024 • PDF

Evaluating a Novel, Portable, Self-Administrable Device (“Beacon”) That Measures Critical Flicker Frequency as a Test for Hepatic Encephalopathy

Philip Vutien, Richard Li, Ravi Karkar, Sean A Munson, James Fogarty, Kara Walter, Michael Yacoub, George N Ioannou

AJG 2023 • PDF • Source

Using Health Concept Surveying to Elicit Usable Evidence: Case Studies of a Novel Evaluation Methodology

Alex Mariakakis, Ravi Karkar, Shwetak N Patel, Julie A Kientz, James Fogarty, Sean A Munson

JMIR 2022 • PDF • Source

The Importance of Starting with Goals in N-of-1 Studies

Sean A. Munson, Jessica Schroeder, Ravi Karkar, Julie A. Kientz, Chia-Fang Chung, and James Fogarty

Frontiers 2020 • PDF • Source

Examining Opportunities for Goal-Directed Self-Tracking to Support Chronic Condition Management

Jessica Schroeder, Ravi Karkar, Natalia Murinova, James Fogarty, and Sean A. Munson

IMWUT 2019 • PDF • Source • Code

Beacon: Designing a Portable Device for Self-Administering a Measure of Critical Flicker Frequency

Ravi Karkar, Rafal Kocielnik, Xiaoyi Zhang, Jasmine Zia, George N. Ioannou, Sean A. Munson, and James Fogarty

IMWUT 2018 • PDF • Source • Code

Examining Self-Tracking by People with Migraine: Goals, Needs, and Opportunities in a Chronic Health Condition

Jessica Schroeder, Chia-Fang Chung, Daniel A. Epstein, Ravi Karkar, Adele Parsons, Natalia Murinova, James Fogarty, and Sean A. Munson

DIS 2018 • Honorable Mention Award (Top 5%) • PDF • Source

TummyTrials: A Feasibility Study of Using Self-Experimentation to Detect Individualized Food Triggers

Ravi Karkar, Jessica Schroder, Daniel A. Epstein, Laura R. Pina, Jeffrey Scofield, James Fogarty, Julie A. Kientz, Sean A. Munson, Roger Vilardaga, and Jasmine Zia

CHI 2017 • Honorable Mention Award (Top 5%) • PDF • Source • Code

A Framework for Self-Experimentation in Personalized Health

Ravi Karkar, Jasmine Zia, Roger Vilardaga, Sonali R. Mishra, James Fogarty, Sean A. Munson, and Julie A. Kientz

JAMIA 2016 • Source

Organizer

Open Session Panel - ICTD and Personal Informatics at ICTD 2019
Discussion - Designing Platforms for N-of-1 Experiments at QSC 2018

Program Committee

Graphics Interface Conference - 2020
Pervasive Health Conference - 2020
CHI workhop - A Short Workshop on Next Step Towards Long Term Self Tracking - CHI 2018

University Service

DUB Student Coordinator - 2017-2019
DUB Doctoral Consortium Co-organzier - 2018, 2019
CSE PhD Admission Committe (as reviewer)- 2017, 2019
CSE 590h Seminar Student Coordinator - 2016-2018
CSE PhD Mentorship Program (as mentor) - 2015-2017
DUB Retreat Student Coordinator - 2017
CSE Visit Days HCI Area Scheduler-in Chief and Housing Coordinator - 2017
CSE Visit Days Housing Coordinator and Activity Coordinator - 2016, 2017

Reviewer

GI, Graphics Interface Conference - 2020
Pervasive Health, EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare - 2017, 2020
CHI, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - 2017-2020
IMWUT, Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (previously UbiComp) - 2016-2018
AMIA, American Medical Informatics Association - 2018
IDC, ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference - 2018
DIS, ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems - 2018
TEI, ACM International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction - 2018
ISWC, International Symposium on Wearable Computers - 2017

Volunteer

Student Volunteer UbiComp - 2015, 2017
Student Volunteer CHI - 2012, 2016

I primarily teach upper-level undergraduate courses related to human-computer interaction and health informatics. I also mentor undergraduate students through honors theses and Early Research Scholars Program.

CompSci 325 - Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction
Info 490PI - Personal Health Informatics

Please reach out to me if you would like to view my course slides or other materials.

A PDF version of the CV can be downloaded from here.