The innovative work of George Demiris, Ph.D., FACMI, has significantly advanced our understanding and application of biomedical informatics, from e-health to home-based patient-centered technologies.
Dr. Demiris explores innovative ways to utilize technology and support patients and their families in various settings, including home and hospice care. He also focuses on designing and evaluating personal health systems that produce patient-generated data including “smart home” solutions for aging, and on understanding the potential of wearable devices or digitally augmented residential settings to support independence and quality of life for community-dwelling older adults. Dr. Demiris’s research provides evidence-based recommendations about how to design systems that older adults can easily adopt and integrate in their lives. He has examined the challenges of privacy and obtrusiveness in the context of technology use, and he has comprehensively examined technical, ethical, and practical challenges associated with the use of technology to support aging and consumer informatics tools.
He is a co-founder of the Hospice Caregiver Research Network—an initiative led by researchers from various academic disciplines, committed to designing and testing interventions to support family caregivers of patients at the end of life. In this context he is currently conducting a clinical trial to examine the impact of a behavioral intervention for hospice caregivers; the trial is informed by problem-solving therapy and positive reappraisal and uses various informatics tools.
He is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and the Gerontological Society of America. He has conducted numerous federally funded studies and his work has been funded consistently over the years both by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Dr. Demiris holds joint faculty appointments in the Informatics Division of the DBEI and in the Department of Biobehavioral Health Sciences of the School of Nursing. He served previously as the Alumni Endowed Professor in Nursing at the University of Washington, where he also directed the Biomedical and Health Informatics Graduate Program and the Clinical Informatics and Patient Centered Technologies Program.
A native of Greece, he earned a Ph.D. in health informatics from the University of Minnesota, following undergraduate and graduate degrees in medical informatics from the University of Heidelberg.