Eric Dishman : General Manager and Global Director of Intel’s Health Research & Innovation Group
Eric Dishman is responsible for driving Intel’s worldwide research, new product innovation, and usability engineering activities in Digital Health. His group, located in the U.S. and Europe, focuses on developing information & communication technologies across the continuum of healthcare from hospital to home. Trained as a social scientist, Eric is also a Principal Research Scientist for Intel’s Digital Health Group, bringing an ethnographic approach to Intel’s research and product development efforts as part of the largest social science team in the technology industry Rehabilitation Center.
His integrated team of social scientists, physicians, designers, and engineers study and even live with patients, family caregivers, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals over long periods of time to observe and understand their specific needs. They then respond to those needs by designing and developing prototypes of new technology solutions which are tested in a variety of real-world healthcare settings. Recent projects include a global study of the needs of the ageing, technologies for helping seniors take their medications through contextualised prompts, an in-home device for tracking the progress of Parkinson’s disease, and new technologies for helping to detect and prevent falls from occuring in the home. Eric’s group recently launched the TRIL (Technology Research for Independent Living) Centre in Dublin Ireland, co-funded by Intel and the Irish government, to become one of the world’s largest academic centres of excellence for inventing and testing independent living technologies.
Eric is co-founder and serves as National Chair of the Centre for Ageing Services Technologies (CAST), a cross-industry advocacy group to accelerate technology R&D for ageing-in-place. He is co-director of ORCATECH with Dr. Jeff Kaye from Oregon Health & Science University – an NIH funded Roybal Centre conducting independent living technology research. Eric helped to found – and is still active in – the Everyday Technologies for Alzheimer’s Care programme with the Alzheimer’s Association. He is an internationally known author and speaker—and advises numerous associations, non-profits, companies, universities, & government officials—on personal health technologies, assistive technologies, telemedicine, and home healthcare.
Niamh Scannell
EMEA Health Research Manager
Digital Health Group
Niamh Scannell currently manages the start-up activities and programmes of Intel’s European Health Research and Innovation Team, Digital Health Group. The European HRI team, based in Dublin, was initiated earlier this year and it is a part of Eric Dishman’s HRI Team based in Oregon, USA.
Eric’s US Team has many years of experience conducting research into home health technologies for seniors and their families who are struggling with cognitive decline, cancer, and cardiovascular disease. The goal of the European HRI team is to extend Digital Health’s research into Europe with a particular focus on understanding ageing in European culture and how technology can be leveraged to support older people remain independent in their own homes. Niamh’s role is to create an interdisciplinary team of social scientists; hardware and software engineers and interaction design researchers and manage the team’s collaborations with European medical, technical, and social science researchers in academia and industry.
Niamh is a first class (top honours) engineering graduate of the National University of Ireland, Galway. She has been with Intel for 14 years and had held a number of manager roles with multi-nation work experiences (US, Europe & the Middle East) leading virtual and direct report teams; the latter half focused on new business programmes. She joined Intel from Digital Equipment Corporation. Niamh is married to Lt Col James Lynott, pilot with the Irish Corp. Niamh & Jim have two daughters.
Simon Roberts
EMEA Ethnographic Research Manager
Intel Digital Health Group
Simon Roberts, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh and experienced applied anthropologist, manages the EMEA ethnographic team of Health Research and Innovation, Digital Health Group. Simon’s role is to build a team of world class social science researchers whose work can shape innovative technology platforms that extend the possibilities for successful ageing-in-place.
Simon is co-PI on the Global Experiences of Ageing project. This is a major study examining older people, their ideas about health and ageing and healthcare systems worldwide. During 2006, this project focused on Europe. In 2007, the research team’s focus will shift to Asia. He is also the Intel lead on the social science aspects of the TRIL Centre research agenda. Simon has published widely on consumer and domestic technology and the use of anthropology in business. He is a member of the Association of Social Anthropologists and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a Member of the Intellect Digital Convergence Council. He has been active in establishing a dialogue between anthropologists practising in the public and private sectors, and their academic counterparts.
Dr Terrance J. Dishongh
Intel Digital Health Group
Terrance (Terry) J. Dishongh, Ph.D. is currently the principal engineer and lead technologist in Intel’s Digital Health Research and Innovation Group. His current duties at Intel Corporation include projections of technology trends in ubiquitous computing, research and development of sensors for healthcare applications, contextual awareness and design of new radio technology for ubiquitous computing. He has designed, developed and prototyped various sensors and sensor network using, Z-wave, Zigbee, X10, mote based systems and Bluetooth technology. Previously, Dr. Dishongh was a Staff Architect in System Manufacturing designing and developing the interface between the processor and the chipset for the Pentium™ III and 4 systems. His designs for packaging are in the Lakeport Chipset, the Pentium® III Processor (Copper-mine), and the Mobile Pentium® II. In his ten years at Intel he has been awarded the Intel Achievement Award, two TMG Excellence award, six Intel Corporation Divisional Recognition Awards, two achievement awards, over 190 trade secrets, and filed over seventy patents during his tenure at Intel Corporation.
Dr. Dishongh has held faculty positions at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has chaired the National Electronic Manufacturers Institution’s roadmap for desktop computer systems for the past five years and for four years he authored the NEMI Healthcare sector roadmap. Terry received his Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Arizona. He received his Master’s Degree and Bachelor’s Degree from the University Tennessee, Knoxville in 1992 and 1990 respectively. Terry has co-author one textbook and over fifty other publications in electronic packaging, biomedical engineering and structural mechanics. Before his academic career Terry, at the age of 17, was a US Army Green Beret in the 7th Special Forces Group Airborne as a volunteer service man. Terry was born in Port Hueneme, California in 1964 and was raised in Pasadena, Texas. Terry currently lives in County Kildare, Ireland with his wife of 22 years, Pamela and his children Katherine (10 years old) and Isaac (8 years old).
Margaret Morris
Intel Digital Health Group
Margaret (“Margie”) Morris is a Senior Researcher in Intel’s Digital Health Group. Margie is a clinical psychologist who studies the ways that emerging technologies can enhance mental and physical wellbeing. She conducts ethnographic research to identify needs and works with engineers to develop and evaluate exploratory prototypes. Margie is currently leading a study on mobile technologies for emotional and cardiovascular health, and recently completed a study of technologies for social engagement among the elderly. Prior to joining Intel in 2002, she studied technology adoption in Sapient’s Experience Modelling group. Margie completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology with a minor in Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of New Mexico, her clinical internship at the San Francisco VA Medical Centre, and her postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. She has a B.A. in English from Haverford College.
John Sherry
Intel Digital Health Group
Director, Social Science and Design Research
John Sherry is Director of Social Science research at Intel’s Digital Health Group. In this capacity, he plans research strategy and manages a portfolio of research activities for the Health Research and Innovation team (Eric Dishman, General Manager). Dr. Sherry and his staff have pursued projects examining nursing in acute care hospital units, emergency medical services, health in underserved regions such as India and sub-Saharan Africa, and numerous projects associated with the health needs of ageing seniors. His team’s projects span a continuum of patient conditions, from relatively healthy individuals who, for behavioural reasons, are at risk of later diseases, to individuals suffering from chronic conditions, and those recently released from hospital.
Dr. Sherry holds an undergraduate degree in Computer Science (University of Portland, OR, USA), and Master’s and PhD in anthropology (University of Arizona, USA). After roughly two years at Microsoft Corporation, he joined Intel in 1996 as the company’s first anthropologist. He was an original member of the “People and Practices Research Group”, a pioneering organisation that was the corporation’s first social science research organisation. In that organisation, Dr. Sherry drove research looking at small businesses, mobile technology use, and more recently, technology and international development. From a personal research perspective, Dr. Sherry has long been interested in the role that technologies play in human life – and in turn how human cultural practices shape technological artefacts.
Michael McGrath
Intel Digital Health Group
Michael McGrath joined Intel in 1999. He has held positions as an Automation engineer working in Ireland Fab Operations and as a researcher in IT Research and Innovation with a focus on High Volume Manufacturing. He moved to his current position as a technologist in the Health Research and Innovation group in 2006. His areas of interest include sensors, wireless communications, assisted living technologies, intelligent user interfaces, data fusion and data management techniques.
Michael received his B.Sc. in Analytical Science from Dublin City University in 1992, a Ph.D. in sensors and instrumentation from Dublin City University in 1995. Michael completed his post-doctoral research work in the department of process engineering in University College Cork focusing on process control and sensor systems for the food and drinks industry. In 1999 Michael received a graduate diploma in Information Technology from Dublin City University and a Graduate Diploma in Computing from ITB in 2004. Michael is currently completing his Master’s Degree in Computing at ITB. Michael is also a Charted Chemist (CChem) and a Charted Scientist (CSi).
Dr David Prendergast
Intel Digital Health Group
Dr David Prendergast is a senior ethnographic researcher in Health Research and Innovation, Digital Health group and is the Intel Liaison to the Social Connection strand of the TRIL Centre. He received his doctorate in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University following a study of intergenerational relationships and family change in South Korea. He has since worked on a number of research projects including an ESRC study of death and dying in the United Kingdom and the provision of home care in Ireland. Since joining Intel he has been involved in several studies including the Global Ageing Experience Project. He has published in a wide number of peer reviewed academic journals and has written two books on the subject of ageing. The first was published in 2005 and is titled From Elder to Ancestor: Old Age, Death and Inheritance in Modern Korea and the other, No Place Like Home was co-authored with colleagues from Trinity College Dublin where he was senior researcher in ageing and social policy.