Dr. Emma Murphy

Dr. Emma Murphy completed and successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled “Designing Auditory Cues for a Multimodal Web Interface” at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast in November 2007. The focus of her PhD was in creating ways of using non-speech sounds to convey navigation and spatial information through non-speech audio rather than solely relying on text to speech synthesis. Before embarking on her PhD, Emma completed an MSc in music technology at the University of Limerick. Her undergraduate degree is in Music and Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin. Emma also received a formal training in classical music at the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

Emma is an Assistant Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate courses including Databases and Data Management. Before joining TU Dublin she was a Research Fellow in the Trinity Centre for Practice & Healthcare Innovation (TCPHI) at Trinity College Dublin and also taught UX Design at IADT.

She previously held an IRC postdoctoral research fellowship at Dublin City University, exploring the potential of technology to enhance learning for older adult students. Emma also have international research experience working as a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University in Montreal on a multidisciplinary research project designing and evaluating multimodal user interfaces. In addition to her academic qualifications, Emma has two years work experience in Digital Media at Dv4, a Dublin-based new media company and two years working as an Accessibility Researcher at the Centre for Inclusive Technology at NCBI – working for people with sight loss.

Emma’s research experience is in the field of Health Informatics, UX design, Digital Ethics and Accessibility. She has more than 40 refereed publications and one patent application in the area of digital health, multimodal interaction, accessibility for people with disabilities and older adults. Emma has over 500 citations on Google SCHOLAR, and an h-index of 12.

Current Projects

• Ethics4EU – Erasmus+ – €449,000 – 3 years

Emma is familiar with European grant structures and reporting processes through working on three major FP7 projects (Dem@Care, VICON and I2web) and as part of the coordinating team on a H2020 project (ProACT). Having also worked on postdoctoral fellowships funded by SFI in Ireland and NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada), she also has experience with national and international funding calls and proposals. Emma co-authored a multilateral EU lifelong learning grant proposal worth €400,000 which was successfully awarded to NCBI as the lead partner in July 2013. In 2014, she was awarded an IRC Government of Ireland postdoctoral research fellowship worth €97,000 euro entitled “Investigating the potential of multimodal interaction design to enhance the experiences of older adult learners in higher education”. In 2016 she was awarded Irish Research Council New Foundations grant with Arthritis Ireland entitled “Developing Arthritis Ireland’s Easy to Use Scheme from pilot project to established trademark scheme” worth €9,511. In 2020 Emma was awarded a second IRC New Foundations grant in collaboration with Sarah Boland and St John Of God Community Services entitled “AccessDesign: Towards an inclusive co-design toolkit for the creation of accessible digital tools” worth €12,000.

• AccessDesign: Irish Research Council New Foundations  – Approximately 1 year

This project was led by Dr Emma Murphy, School of Computer Science, TU Dublin and Sarah Boland, St John of God (SJOG) community services. Participatory design holds great potential for the creation of inclusive technology but existing toolkits and resources to support co-design are not always accessible to designers and co-designers with disabilities. In the AccessDesign project we conducted a series of co-design focus group sessions involving the service users with intellectual disabilities who were previously involved in the co-design collaboration with SJOG Services and TU Dublin. The data collected during these design sessions has been integrated to form an accessible design toolkit through a series of iterative workshops. This toolkit is intended to generate a sustainable resource to be reused in the programme at TU Dublin but also in the wider community of inclusive design.

Emma has developed strong international networks in the fields of sound design, multimodal interaction and inclusive design and has collaborated and published with internationally influential academics in the fields of auditory perception (Professor Stephen McAdams), sound synthesis and Audio DSP (Professor Gary Scavone) and web accessibility and inclusive design (Professor Helen Petrie). She also has strong national collaborations in the field of digital health (Dr Julie Doyle), UX design (Dr Andrew Errity) and accessibility (Dr Donal Fitzpatrick, Dr Ian Pitt) in both academic and NGO (Arthritis Ireland, NCBI, SJOG) sectors in Ireland.

• Smith, S., Murphy, E. Hannigan, C. Dinsmore, D., Doyle, J. (2019) Supporting older people with multimorbidity: the care burden of home healthcare assistants in Ireland to appear in the Journal of Home Health Care Services Quarterly, (Taylor and Francis Online).

• Doyle, J, Murphy, E, Smith, S, Hannigan, C, Kuiper, J, Jacobs, A & Dinsmore, J. (2019) Managing Multimorbidity: Identifying Design Requirements for a Digital Self-Management Tool to Support Older Adults with Multiple Chronic Conditions to appear in the Proceedings of ACM CHI ’19 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Glasgow, UK.

• Doyle, J, Murphy, E., Hannigan, C, Smith, S. Silva, J.B., Dinsmore, J. (2018). Designing Digital Goal Support Systems for Multimorbidity Self-Management: Insights from Older Adults and their Care Network. In Proceedings of the 12th EAI International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth ’18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 168-177.

• Doyle, J, Murphy, E, Smith, S, Hannigan, C, Kuiper, J, Jacobs, A & Dinsmore, J. (2017). Addressing Medication Management Challenges for Older People with Multimorbidities: A Multi-Stakeholder Approach, SIGCHI, In Pervasive Health: ACM SIGCHI, Barcelona, Spain.

• Murphy, E., Doyle, J., Hannigan, C., Smith, S., Kuiper, J., Jacobs, A., Maluccelli, L.,Brady A.M., Dinsmore, J. (2017). Perceptions and Use of Technology to Support Older Adults with Multimorbidity. Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 242, 160–167.

• Murphy, E. (2016). Older Adults, Learning and Technology – An Exploration of Tangible Interaction and Multimodal Representation of Information. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education, Rome, Italy (pp. 359–367). 

• Murphy, E. (2015) An exploration of UDL and interaction design to enhance the experiences of older adult learners in Proceedings of the AHEAD Conference Universal Design for Learning: A License to Learn, Dublin Castle, Dublin; 03/2015.

• Said, K., Kuber, R., Murphy, E. (2015) AudioAuth: Exploring the Design and Usability of a Sound- Based Authentication System. International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction, 7(4), 16-34.

• King, M., Hu, F., McHugh, J., Murphy, E., Newman, E., Irving, K., & Smeaton, A. F. (2013). Visibility of Wearable Sensors as Measured Using Eye Tracking Glasses. In AmI 2013 Workshops, Dublin, Ireland, December 3-5, 2013. Revised Selected Papers (pp. 23–32).

• Power, C., Petrie, H., Swallow, D., Murphy, E., Gallagher, B., & Velasco, C. A. (2013). Navigating, Discovering and Exploring the Web: Strategies Used by People with Print Disabilities on Interactive Websites. In 14th IFIP TC 13 International Conference, Cape Town, South Africa, September 2-6, 2013, Proceedings, Part I (pp. 667–684).