Judith Amores Fernandez

Fluid Interfaces

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Research Affiliate

Judith is a Research Fellow at the MGH/Harvard Medical School, department of psychiatry, and a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab, where she did her PhD and master’s and helped run VR/ARatMIT as a co-president. She holds a multimedia engineering degree from LaSalle University, Barcelona, Spain, and has a computer science background and design focused on UX, UI, and filming. She previously interned as a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher at Microsoft Research and at R&D at URL Barcelona, developing Augmented and Virtual Reality experiences and at the Google Creative Lab as a Creative Technologist. Her grants, awards, and publications include over 30 peer-reviewed research papers, two patents, Best Paper and Demo Awards at premier venues in human-computer interaction and bioengineering, as well as the Scent Innovator Award by the Cosmetic Executive Women (CEW) and IFF (International Flavors and Fragrances). Facebook Graduate Fellowship, INK fellow, LEGO Foundation-sponsored research and finalist of the Fast Company's Innovation by Design Awards and the 2021 Edison Awards.

Research

Judith's research is in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), but uses an interdisciplinary approach combining methods from the fields of Engineering, Psychology, and Design. Her vision is to create subtle User Interfaces (UI) that can access our unconscious mind to improve our health and enhance our cognition. Her PhD research focused on Olfactory Interfaces that dynamically release scent to improve well-being and support memory consolidation based on real-time physiological information.

She has also worked with audio-visual interfaces and created Virtual and Augmented Reality experiences that change their audio-visuals and release scents based on the user's breathing and heart rate or brain activity so as to increase relaxation, mindfulness, or reduce phobias. Her work contributed to the development of new technologies and applications and included studies to evaluate their effects on the user. Her research goal is to study how humans may interact with the unconscious mind for health, memory and to reduce implicit biases. She is interested in developing concepts, devices, and technologies for personalized health interventions and cognitive enhancement using human-centered design and engineering.

More specifically, she is interested in:

Designing non-traditional user interfaces and alternative sensing methods to implicitly interact with the user.
Engineering cutting-edge devices to support mental health and to advance better practices for ambulatory care.
Research and development of complementary approaches to traditional medicine using multi-modal interface technology.

For more information, please visit her website or Google Scholar for a list of her research papers.

She is currently working at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School on NIH-funded projects on how neuromodulation methods can modulate the placebo/nocebo effect and treatment of alternative medicine as well as the mechanisms of mind-body intervention.

CV_Judith_Amores.pdf (PDF)