Assistant Professor
School of Information
University of Michigan

Contact
4364 North Quad
105 S State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

phone: 734.764.8624
email: klasnja [at] umich.edu
twitter: @pklasnja

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan and a Scientific Investigator at the Group Health Research Institute.

I received a Ph.D. in Information Science at the Information School at the University of Washington, advised by Wanda Pratt. Following the Ph.D., I stayed at the University of Washington as a National Library of Medicine Postdoctoral Fellow in the Division of Biomedical and Health Informatics.

My research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and Health Informatics. I study how technology can help people to better manage their health and to more effectively communicate with their healthcare providers. Because a great deal of what people need to do to improve their health—being physically active, eating healthily, taking medications regularly, etc.—happens in the midst of daily life and away from the clinic, one area I study is how technology can help people to adopt and sustain such health-promoting activities. I see mobile technology as a particularly powerful tool for providing this support. Over 60% of U.S. population have smartphones—pocket computers that have an always-on internet connection, are equipped with large number of sensors, and can run sophisticated applications. And these devices are with us all the time. Their technical capabilities and the fact  they are always close at hand make mobile phones a perfect platform for supporting health behavior change. I explore the  ways in which phones can keep people engaged with their health goals throughout the day, discover opportunities for healthy behavior, and reflect on their behavior patterns to identify ways to improve their health without disrupting relationships and routines that are important to them.

But while health management often happens away from the clinic, it shouldn't happen in isolation from healthcare providers. A second focus of my work is on using technology to help people to more effectively communicate with their healthcare teams. I study how technology can be used to help patients to manage information for their care and to collect and share information that can help their care teams to make better treatment decisions.

To study these issues, I rely on a broad range of methods, including interviews, surveys, ecological momentary assessment, and rapid prototyping of new technologies, which I evaluate in in situ field studies. Over the last year, my main methodological focus has been on micro-randomized trials, a new method for optimization of mHealth interventions developed by my collaborator Susan Murphy.

My projects cover a range of health domains. I have done work around cancer care, physical activity, and diabetes. My current projects examine medication adherence, self-management of the bipolar disorder, and physical-activity maintenance following cardiac rehabilitation.

News

August 2016: My collaborator Susan Murphy did an interview on the Stateside NPR program about just-in-time adaptive interventions.

June 2015: Susanne Boll, Eric Hekler, and I are co-organizing a Dagstuhl seminar on life-long behavior change technologies.

March 2015: I am giving a talk about mHealth and micro-randomized trials at the ENAR 2015 meeting.

December 2014: I am thrilled to announce that we were just rewarded a $1.9 million grant from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute to develop and test a mobile intervention for supporting physical-activity maintenance after cardiac rehabilitation.

May 2014: I will be giving a closing keynote at the Pervasive Health conference in Oldenburg, Germany.

March 2014: On April 2nd, I'll be giving a talk about just-in-time adaptive interventions at the NIH Workshop on Innovative Study Designs and Methods for Developing, Testing and Implementing Behavioral Interventions to Improve Health.