Sabrina Lakhdhir awarded an NSERC Post-Graduate Scholarship - Doctoral

PhD student Sabrina Lakhdhir was awarded an NSERC Post-graduate Scholarship - Doctoral to continue her research on personalization of wearable technologies and data.

Wearable technologies are widely available and used by many individuals for a number of reasons. However, wearables are often designed as one-size-fits-all solutions for the “average” user, and do not cater to individual needs and desires such as self-expression and particular ways of engaging with data. With the funds received from NSERC, she aims to explore approaches towards making wearable technologies more adaptive and responsive to user needs by empowering individuals to customize their devices. By doing so, she hopes to introduce and offer novel and accessible bottom-up approaches to end-users towards wearable technology design. Through this work, she expects to contribute to the ever-growing understanding of diversity awareness and individuals’ ability to engage with information, software, and hardware, and to demonstrate the democratized use of technology for broader engagement regarding customization for the purposes of creativity, utility, and expressiveness.