Digital Health Equity

This class has been available to OMSCS students for a while now but has not been on omscentral for some reason so I'll happily write the first review. I'm only now seeing on omscentral but I took this course a few semesters ago so i might be a bit hazy on some of the details.

Professor Parker is very knowledgeable in her subject field which made all the lectures easy to understand. She records the lectures herself, so they are well made and seem relatively up to date. This is more of a do your research and write papers type of course and is not code heavy at all.

You are given weekly lectures and readings about health equity. You will mostly learn about disparities within healthcare and how technology can be used to fight those disparities through the use of apps, websites, or other forms of technology. Based on these lectures and readings, you will write reports every few weeks ( i forgot how many, maybe 3 reports) and in between those reports you will develop 2 papers in which you design a prototype for a chosen health equity issue you wish to address.

Throughout the semester, you will also work in a group on a specific project of your groups choosing. This can involve code but it can also be completely free from it. It depends on how your group wants to tackle it. This project has milestones which will need to be completed in addition to the research and design papers mentioned above which all make for a pretty writing intensive course.

For our project we made a high-fidelity non-functional application using FIGMA so if designing is your thing, you'll enjoy this course.

This class feels like a combination of AIES, Ubiquitous computing (only the good parts), and HCI. Overall, I enjoyed this course and would recommend it.