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Kyle Montague

Associate Professor

NorSC, Northumbria University

Curriculum vitae

I'm an Associate Professor at Northumbria University and lead the NorSC Research Group . My research spans a breadth of topics and domains with the unifying vision - to address critical social problems and challenges by designing and configuring digital technologies that empower individuals and marginalised communities. More specifically, my work seeks to democratise access to the tools and processes by which we provision technologies and services that shape society.

Interests

  • Digital Civics
  • Inclusive Design
  • Accessibility
  • Digital Health

Education

  • PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, 2014

    University of Dundee

  • BSc in Applied Computing, 2009

    University of Dundee

Experience

 
 
 
 
 

Associate Professor in Human-Computer Interaction

NorSC, Northumbria University

Jul 2020 – Present Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
 
 
 
 
 

Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction

Open Lab, Newcastle University

Aug 2017 – Jul 2020 Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
 
 
 
 
 

Post-Doctoral Research Associate

Open Lab, Newcastle University

Feb 2016 – Aug 2017 Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
 
 
 
 
 

Post-Doctoral Research Associate

School of Computing, University of Dundee

Jan 2014 – Feb 2016 Dundee, UK
 
 
 
 
 

Co-Founder & Technical Director

iGiveADamn Community Interest Company

Jun 2009 – Jan 2014 Dundee, UK

Research Funding

IDEA-FAST: Identifying digital endpoints to assess fatigue, sleep and activities of daily living in neurodegenerative disorders and immune-mediated inflammatory diseases

Fatigue and sleep disturbances are two common and disabling symptoms that affect patients with neurodegenerative disorders (NDD) and …

COLOSPEED: Development of a world-leading colorectal cancer research hub in the North East of England

COLO-SPEED will harness the enthusiasm of local endoscopy teams and build a long-term sustainable research infrastructure, using the …

Design and initial evaluation of an autism-specific health check for use with autistic adults in NHS Primary Care

Autistic people are more likely to experience poor health than people who are not autistic. Some don't seek help when they are unwell …

Engaging the workforce in real time: listening, understanding and responding to what matters most to our staff

Of the 1.4 million people who work in the NHS in England, more than 50% say they are unable to meet all of the conflicting demands on …

Distributed Ledgers and Decentralised Energy in Sub Saharan Africa

The global mobile phone industry has emerged as an important partner in achieving the UN's goals of sustainable energy access for all …

Enabling Ongoingness

The ‘oldest old’ are the fastest growing age group in the UK and a grand societal challenge we face is that the nature of …

SILVER: Smart Interventions for Local Vulnerable Families

One of Connected Health Cities’ major areas of interest in the North East and North Cumbria is the high risk user groups and vulnerable …

DERC: Digital Economy Research Centre

The Digital Economy Research Centre (DERC) will theorise, design, develop, and evaluate new digitally mediated models of citizen …

Identifying Health Promoting Elements in Care Homes

A 12 month research challenge, whereby we aim to assemble a community of stakeholders around the topic of enabling and health promoting …

Postdoctoral and Early Career Researcher Exchanges

Two month long research exchanges with University of Lisbon and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) to extend ongoing research …

Inclusive Design & Innovation

Research Group

Researchers

Linnea Groot

Linnea Groot

Research Assistant

Luis Carvalho

Luis Carvalho

Research Assistant

Dalya Al-Shahrabi

Dalya Al-Shahrabi

Research Engineer

PhD Students

Jay Rainey

Jay Rainey

PhD Student

Delvin Varghese

Delvin Varghese

PhD Student

Publications

Food Aid Technology: The Experience of a Syrian Refugee Community in Coping with Food Insecurity

Over half of Syrian refugee households in Lebanon are food insecure with some reliant on an electronic voucher system for food aid. The …

Design Research to Support Ongoingness

This article details the development of a live design research project working with people who are bereaved, people are living with …

TalkFutures: Supporting Qualitative Practices in Distributed Community Engagements

Community engagements are qualitative processes that make use of participants local knowledge for democratic decision-making, but often …

Open Challenges of Blind People using Smartphones

Blind people face significant challenges when using smartphones. The focus on improving non-visual mobile accessibility has been at the …

HCI at End of Life & Beyond

Death, whilst an inevitable part of being alive, factors more significantly in our lives than the event itself. The role that …

The Design Space of Nonvisual Word Completion

Word completion interfaces are ubiquitously available in mobile virtual keyboards; however, there is no prior research on how to design …

A Call For Embedding Dignity In Humanitarian Technologies

Increasingly, technologies are being designed to support refugees. While HCI research has explored several aspects of refugee …

Co-sleep: Designing a workplace-based wellness program for sleep deprivation

Sleep deprivation is a growing public health issue which has a range of implications on a person’s working routine. Yet despite the …

Assistive Technologies

Over the last three decades, the Web has become an increasingly important platform that affects every part of our lives: from …

Involving Syrian Refugees in Design Research: Lessons Learnt from the Field

With the Syrian crisis entering its 8th year, refugees have become the focus of research across multiple disciplines, including design …

WhatFutures: Designing Large-Scale Engagements on WhatsApp

WhatsApp, as the world's most popular messaging application, offers significant opportunities for improving the reach and effectiveness …

Gabber: Supporting Voice in Participatory Qualitative Practices

We describe the iterative design, development and learning process we undertook to produce Gabber, a digital platform that aims to …

Human-Data Interaction in the Context of Care: Co-designing Family Civic Data Interfaces and Practices

By storing data about citizens for the purposes of service provision, private and public organizations have disempowered the people …

Exploring Media Capture of Meaningful Experiences to Support Families Living with Dementia

Although designing interactive media experiences for people with dementia has become a growing interest in HCI, a strong focus on …

‘Blueprints’ physical to digital: curation of media to support ongoingness

Through describing ‘Blueprints’, a series of fabric collages, we detail a method for translating physical properties of objects into …

Usability testing of MySkinSelfie: a mobile phone application for skin self-monitoring

Teledermatology generally involves doctors taking images of patients; however, patients increasingly want to own or have easy access to …

Making open data work for civic advocacy

The value of data in supporting citizen participation in processes of place-making and community building is widely recognised. While …

Aidme: interactive non-visual smartphone tutorials

The constant barrage of updates and novel applications to explore creates a ceaseless cycle of new layouts and interaction methods that …

Parklearn: creating, sharing and engaging with place-based activities for seamless mobile learning

The potential for mobile technology to support bespoke learning activities seamlessly across learning contexts has not been fully …

Understanding the family perspective on the storage, sharing and handling of family civic data

Across social care, healthcare and public policy, enabled by the big data revolution (which has normalized large-scale data-based …

Data Donors: Sharing Knowledge for Mobile Accessibility

Individuals regularly face challenges when interacting with their mobile devices particularly if they are not tech savvy users. When …

Improving Smartphone Accessibility with Personalizable Static Overlays

The physical keypads that used to dominate our mobile devices provided additional support for non-visual interaction - the keys could …

In-context Q&A to support blind people using smartphones

Blind people face many barriers using smartphones. Still, previous research has been mostly restricted to non-visual gestural …

WheelieMap: an exploratory system for qualitative reports of inaccessibility in the built environment

The built environment remains a persistent accessibility challenge for people with mobility impairments. Whilst platforms to report …

Implications of Synchronous IVR Radio on Syrian Refugee Health and Community Dynamics

With 1,033,513 Syrian refugees adding a strain on the Lebanese healthcare system, innovation is key to improving access to healthcare. …

Exploring public places as infrastructures for civic m-learning

We present insights from a series of engagements with multiple stakeholders in local parks, aiming to explore the potential for …

Prototyping Ubiquitous Imaging Surfaces

Mass adoption and innovation in the field of the Internet of Things has transformed the environments we live in, from stale siloes of …

Ubiquitous Text Interaction

Computer-based interactions increasingly pervade our everyday environments. Be it on a mobile device, a wearable device, a wall-sized …

Sangoshthi: Empowering Community Health Workers through Peer Learning in Rural India

The Healthcare system of India provides outreach services to the rural population with a key focus on the maternal and child health …

Investigating laboratory and everyday typing performance of blind users

Over the last decade there have been numerous studies on touchscreen typing by blind people. However, there are no reports about blind …

Evaluation of MySkinSelfie: A new mobile app for patient skin self-monitoring

Patients are increasingly bringing their own mobile phone photos to clinic to help in the diagnosis and management of their skin …

Effect of target size on non-visual text-entry

Touch-enabled devices have a growing variety of screen sizes; however, there is little knowledge on the effect of key size on …

Towards Inviscid Text-Entry for Blind People through Non-Visual Word Prediction Interfaces

Word prediction can significantly improve text-entry rates on mobile touchscreen devices. However, these interactions are inherently …

Blind people interacting with large touch surfaces: Strategies for one-handed and two-handed exploration

Interaction with large touch surfaces is still a relatively infant domain, particularly when looking at the accessibility solutions …

Getting Smartphones to Talkback: Understanding the Smartphone Adoption Process of Blind Users

The advent of system-wide accessibility services on mainstream touch-based smartphones has been a major point of inclusion for blind …

TinyBlackBox: supporting mobile in-the-wild studies

Most work investigating mobile HCI is carried out within controlled laboratory settings; these spaces are not representative of the …

Typing performance of blind users: An analysis of touch behaviors, learning effect, and in-situ usage

Non-visual text-entry for people with visual impairments has focused mostly on the comparison of input techniques reporting on …

Holibraille: Multipoint vibrotactile feedback on mobile devices

We propose HoliBraille, a system that enables Braille input and output on current mobile devices. We use vibrotactile motors combined …

Tablets get physical: non-visual text entry on tablet devices

Tablet devices can display full-size QWERTY keyboards similar to the physical ones. Yet, the lack of tactile feedback and the inability …

Motor-impaired touchscreen interactions in the wild

Touchscreens are pervasive in mainstream technologies; they offer novel user interfaces and exciting gestural interactions. However, to …

B#: chord-based correction for multitouch braille input

Braille has paved its way into mobile touchscreen devices, providing faster text input for blind people. This advantage comes at the …

SUM: an exploration of Shared User Models and interface adaptations to improve accessibility of mobile touchscreen interactions

Touchscreens are ever-present in technologies today. The large featureless sensors are rapidly replacing the physical keys and buttons …

The today and tomorrow of Braille learning

Despite the overwhelming emergence of accessible digital technologies, Braille still plays a role in providing blind people with access …

Augmenting braille input through multitouch feedback

Current touch interfaces lack the rich tactile feedback that allows blind users to detect and correct errors. This is especially …

Designing for individuals: usable touch-screen interaction through shared user models

Mobile touch-screen devices are becoming increasingly popular across a diverse range of users. Whilst there is a wealth of information …

Web accessibility as a side effect

This paper explores evidence for the conjecture that improvements in Web accessibility have arisen, in part, as side effects of changes …

Interactions speak louder than words: shared user models and adaptive interfaces

Touch-screens are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. They have great appeal due to their capabilities to support new forms of human …

Evaluation of adaptive interaction with mobile touch-screen devices

Mobile touch-screen devices are becoming increasingly more popular across a diverse range of users. Whilst these smart phone devices …

Adaptive interfaces: a little learning is a dangerous thing...

In this paper we present a possible approach to improve accessibility and usability of software applications through shared user …

Accessible design through shared user modelling

In the proposed thesis, research examines possible exploitations of shared user modelling in order to improve the accuracy and scope of …

Accessible Indoor Navigation

This research focuses on designing an indoor navigation application for disabled users. Outdoor navigation systems make use of GPS …