From Human-Centered Results to Real-World Impact: Medical Humanities Cross-disciplinary Research

This collaboratively written paper presents three case studies where researchers from the humanities and from biomedicine collaborated on topics related to health and medicine. This process-focused paper outlines several key considerations that can lead to research that successfully integrates medical humanities expertise and more traditionally biomedical forms of inquiry. In the context of an increasing embrace of aggregation, emblematized by the rise of artificial intelligence, we demonstrate how incorporating humanities methodologies can offer research paradigms that can balance out or complement the downsides of aggregated data. The case studies include one that used narrative-based inquiry to study the experience of caregivers navigating pediatric pain management; another that focused on the use of storyboarding in bioengineering and medical device design; and a third that detailed an artistic and scientific collaboration between composers, dancers, and neuroscientists. Crucially, this paper focuses less on the benefits of multidisciplinary research, which have already been documented, and more on the complexities of the multidisciplinary research process. In order to successfully produce human-centered research, every discipline involved in these three projects evinces a dedication to multidisciplinary collaboration from the earliest conception, an embrace of creative and qualitative techniques such as storyboarding, and a willingness to tailor creative expression to serve science.