Innovative Approaches to Health Communication: Interdisciplinary Insights from Linguistics, Digital Media, and Practices - Hannah Xiang
This project was designed to foster dialogue and collaboration across disciplines in order to address pressing challenges in healthcare communication. Health communication is central to how patients and professionals interact, shaping decision-making, trust, and the sharing of experiences around illness and wellbeing. In particular, language plays a key role in how people make sense of illness, disclose personal experiences, interpret risks, and exchange health information across different cultural and social contexts. At the same time, the rapid integration of digital technologies into healthcare, including telemedicine, health apps and AI-driven tools, has introduced both new opportunities and challenges for patient engagement and service delivery.
In this context, the project sets out to explore how insights from applied linguistics, psychology, sociology, computer science, digital methods and clinical practice can be brought together to enrich healthcare research. Our aim was to create a supportive space through workshops, networking events and engagement activities where researchers and practitioners could exchange perspectives, reflect on methodologies and develop new collaborations. The overall intention was not only to spark new interdisciplinary conversations but also to lay the foundations for sustained collaboration and future research in the field of health communication.
Between April and July 2025, the project delivered a series of interdisciplinary activities that successfully engaged PhD students, early-career researchers, and practitioners working at the intersection of linguistics, healthcare, and digital media. Please see the link.
Key Outcomes
- Created a supportive interdisciplinary community of PhD students, ECRs, and practitioners working on healthcare communication.
- Generated innovative ideas and potential collaborations for future projects.
- Developed a preliminary methodological toolkit for researching healthcare apps.
- Strengthened cross-cultural dialogue by engaging with frontline Chinese doctors.
- Provided development opportunities for ECRs through presenting, networking, and co-design activities.
The project facilitated discussions on future directions for researching health communication in digital contexts. PI Honglin Xiang established new connections with PhD students and early career researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, and several follow-up projects are already underway as a result of these activities. These include a collaboration with Fangzhou Zhang on trust and gender in health apps, and a project with Fei Ji on human–AI interaction for wellbeing support.
In addition to two conference presentations, the collaboration between Honglin and Fei will continue. We aim to prepare a journal article for submission by the end of this year. Furthermore, the healthcare app research co-authored by Honglin Xiang and Fangzhou Zhang has been accepted as a book chapter and is scheduled for publication next year.
