a design researcher who works on human-centred experience design of personal health technologies.
Currently, I am an assistant professor of Interaction Design at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
Are you interested in collaborating or working with me or just having a chat about your research? Feel free to reach out to me via a.karahanoglu(at)utwente.nl.
My research centres on experience and human-centred design, particularly in the context of personal health technologies such as personal informatics, health tracking apps and self-tracking tools. I investigate how interaction design can create socially and personally acceptable self-tracking technologies. Currently, I focus on data sensemaking in health management, exploring the role of interaction design in tracking physical activity, exercise, sports, and injury rehabilitation. My work integrates physiology, psychology, and interaction design to craft meaningful data interactions for promoting, among others, physical activity and sports engagement.
I have an Industrial Design background. I have a PhD degree from Middle East Technical University (METU) of Turkey. I worked as a researcher at METU, Department of Industrial Design and Product Usability Testing Unit (UTEST) for several years. During my PhD, I was granted the prestigious Fulbright PhD Student Scholarship, and I studied at Carnegie Mellon University, Human-Computer Interaction Institute (USA).
📣 NEW DIS2025 PAPER! Our PhD student, Tina Ekhtiar, will be in Madeira Portugal in July 2025, to present her work, Changing Health Goals with Personal Informatics.
📣 Our PhD student Danique Hoftsee presented her work about body maps as a source of women’s embodied experiences in EKSIG 2025, in May 2025. The paper can be downloaded from here.
📣 NEW CHI2025 PAPER! I was in CHI2025 in Yokohama, Japan to talk about our work in which we largely investigated trust in AI-assisted decision-making in collaborative decision-making for personal health. The paper can be downloaded via this link.
📣 Our second CHI2025 paper is a narrative review of facilitators and barriers of wearable stress management technology, main-authored by our PhD student Merel van den Berg. The paper can be downloaded via this link.
📣 Together with my colleague Max Birk (TU/e), we chaired the “Human-Computer Interaction and Societal Impact in the Netherlands” session in ICT Open, on 16 April 2025.
📣 I was one of the hosts of the CHI NL Community Event and welcomed the Dutch HCI community to the University of Twente (UT), Enschede, on April 10th, 2025.
📣 As of April 2025, I became a board member of CHI Nederland, the ACM SIGCHI Chapter that connects, supports, and represents the HCI community in the NL.
📣 As of June 2024, I am the track coordinator of the Human-Technology Relations master’s specialisation of Industrial Design Engineering Program, at the University of Twente.
📣 We received a Pioneers in Health Care (PIHC) voucher (€65K) in 2024. This project aims to expand our research about the use of activities of daily living in stroke rehabilitation. Our story has been published in UT Stories in January 2025.
📣 I organised a NordiCHI2024 workshop entitled “Life in Transitions: The Role of Technology in Supporting Well-being in the Heart of Change” Uppsala on 13 October 2024.
📣 I received NWO-Social Sciences and Humanities Open Competition (XS) (€49K) personal grant in 2023 to understand the extent and limits of human trust in human-technology partnerships during shared health decision-making.
⭐️ Postma, D., van Delden, R., Reidsma, D. & Karahanoğlu, A. (2024). From Metrics to Experiences: Investigating How Sport Data Shapes the Social Context, Self-Determination and Motivation of Athletes. Interacting with Computers, iwae012, https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwae012 (Open Access)
🏆 Karahanoğlu, A., Coskun, A., Postma, D, Scheltinga, B., Gouveia, R., Reidsma, D., and Renalda, J. (2024). Is it just a score? : Understanding Training Load Management Practices Beyond Sports Tracking. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), May 11–16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642051 (Honorable mention 🏆) pdf link
⭐️ Elvitigala, D., Karahanoğlu, A., Matviienko, A., Vidal, L. V., Postma, D., Jones,M., Montoya, M.F., Harrison,D. Elbaek, L., Daiber, F., Burr, L., Patibanda, R. Buono, P., Hamalainen, P., van Delden, R. Bernhaupt, R., Ren, X., van Rheden, V., Zambetta, F., van den Hoven, E., Lallemand, C., Reidsma, D., and Mueller, F. (2024). Grand Challenges in SportsHCI. In Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), May 11–16, 2024, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642050. pdf link.
⭐️ Postma, D., Karahanoğlu, A., Delden, R., Reidsma, D. (2023). The Cost of Reward: A Critical Reflection on the ‘What’, ‘How’, and ‘Why’ of Gamification for Motivation in Sports. In Companion Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY Companion ’23), October 10–13, 2023, Stratford, ON, Canada. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3573382.3616102 pdf link
🏆 Ekhtiar, T., Karahanoğlu, A., Gouveia, R., and Ludden, G. (2023). Goals for Goal Setting: A Scoping Review on Personal Informatics. InDesigning Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’23), July 10–14, 2023, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596087 (Honorable mention 🏆) pdf link
⭐️ Coskun, A., & Karahanoğlu, A. (2022). Data Sensemaking in Self-Tracking: Towards a New Generation of Self-Tracking Tools, International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 39:12, 2339-2360 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2022.2075637 pdf link