Dr Claire McCallum
I’m currently an R&D Fellow at Zinc VC focussing on Digital Health and Impact Evaluation. My role involves working with ventures to help them understand and assess their social impact through rapid experimentation and clinical trials.
I’m also an Honorary Digital Health Lecturer at the University of Bristol Centre for Digital Health and Care, where I previously taught Responsible Innovation and Research Methods and co-led the MSc in Digital Health Final Projects.
My postdoctoral research involved developing and conducting a fully-remote app store evaluation of an app for people living with Sjögren’s Syndrome: a rheumatic autoimmune disease. This involved working across the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, and School of Design, with Kate Hackett and John Vines.
My PhD (University of Glasgow) explored how to increase efficiency when evaluating health apps and wearables for behaviour change. This included (i) an interdisciplinary review of methods used to assess physical activity apps and wearables (ii) a methodological framework for conducting fully remote N-of-1 trials and (iii) interviews with health and HCI researchers, data scientists, and industry professionals to explore barriers to evaluating effectiveness using alternative methods to randomised control trials (RCTs). This PhD was funded for 4 years through a Lord Kelvin Adam Smith Scholarship (for interdisciplinary researchers). I worked in the Institute of Health and Wellbeing and School of Computing Science (HCI group, GIST), supervised by Cindy Gray, John Rooksby and Matthew Chalmers.
Interests
- Doing rapid and rigorous science within real-world commercial settings; applying health and social science research methods
- Evaluation methods for assessing digital health technologies:
- N-of-1 trials and individual-level outcomes
- Automated remote trials (from app store recruitment to real-time effectiveness analyses)
- Multiphase Optimisation Strategy for understanding the effectiveness of intervention components
- Development of complex digital health interventions using theory and evidence
- User centred design
- Understanding the relationship between impact evaluation and commercial success
- Scoping reviews, systematic reviews, and app content analysis
Contact
claire@zinc.vc
Claire McCallum 