Vasiliki Mylonopoulou, PhD

Vasiliki Mylonopoulou is a Marie Skłodowska Curie alumnus. She has worked on designing social features in technology supporting health behaviour change. Her Ph.D. thesis resulted in a design tool that can be used by practitioners in designing health and wellbeing technology that includes social aspects. She is passionate about designing and evaluating technology to support better people's diverse needs. Vasiliki is interested in matters related to invisible conditions and specifically to mental health and developmental learning disorders in adulthood such as work integration, awareness, and policies. In 2019, Vasiliki got the Equality and Diversity award from the University of Oulu and since then she initiates and organizes the event: A Different Way of Working and Studying.

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Currently, she is a visiting scholar at the University of Oulu and she works as a senior lecturer at the University of Goteborg, Sweden, in the newly found division of Human-Computer Interaction in the Applied IT department. She conducted her post-doc as part of the project Digital Seniors which focuses to create design tools for designing technology for our older selves (casual technology users). She is part of the More Stamina app science team, which aims to support people experiencing multiple sclerosis to manage their energy. 

Opportunities for Cooperation

Sweden and Finland have strong anti-discrimination laws, especially in the work environment. However, they still have vast testimonials of people with invisible conditions getting discriminated against and feeling unsafe to disclose their condition. This leads them to worse mental health, sick leaves, early retirement, and unemployment. The impact of invisible conditions is greater on females as they often stay longer undiagnosed. This situation is expected to worsen due to Covid-19 restrictions.
 

How can technology support education, knowledge enhancement, and attitude change in reducing the stigma of invisible conditions - such as mental health issues - and creating environments that are safe for disclosure?