RBTC's Lunch & Learn
Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce
1948 Franklin Road Southwest Suite 200 Roanoke, VA 24014-1154 United States
Join us for our RBTC Lunch & Learn with Bhuvana Narayanamurthy "Designing for Memory, Attention, and Real Caregiving Work" Implications for products used under interruption and pressure.
Mobile technologies play a central role in caregiving and care coordination. This talk examines the key experiences that caregiving apps need to incorporate to make them cognitively accessible for people with memory, attention, and related executive impairments. The analysis is grounded in caregiving apps, but the experiences it surfaces apply to products across verticals that are used under conditions of interruption and pressure.
Based on an academically motivated, practitioner-friendly analysis of key user flows in widely used caregiving and health apps, the session is organized around questions important for cognitive accessibility, such as: What am I doing right now, and why? Did I actually do the thing? What if I miss the moment the system expects me to act? Can I correct the record later?
The talk shows how these questions surface when systems rely on assumptions about memory, timing, and uninterrupted attention that often do not hold in practice. Cognitive accessibility is used here as a stress test: if a system can support people with memory and attention constraints, it is better equipped to support anyone operating under interruption, delay, or pressure.
The session connects these questions to established cognitive science research and to the W3C Cognitive Accessibility guidance, offering a grounded way to identify and reduce cognitive strain in caregiving technologies and beyond.
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Lunch will be provided starting at 11:30 AM, with our speaker kicking off at noon. We’ll wrap up by 1:00 PM, leaving you energized and ready to take on the rest of your day. Come hungry—for knowledge, connection, and a great meal.
Doors open at 11:30 AM for networking and lunch with programming beginning at 12:00 PM. Program ends at 1:00 PM.
Speaker Spotlight
Bhuvana Narayanamurthy, PhD is a cognitive accessibility researcher and UX practitioner with over a decade of experience designing and evaluating complex digital systems across healthcare, enterprise, and public-sector contexts. She holds a PhD in Media, Technology, and Society from Northwestern University and has worked in academic, government, and industry settings, including Virginia Tech, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the World Bank, and enterprise consulting organizations.
Her professional work spans UX research, workflow design, usability evaluation, and accessibility-focused design for large-scale, high-stakes systems. In recent roles, she has led research-driven design initiatives focused on cognitive load, coordination, and error recovery, including work on human–AI workflows and accessibility-aligned design frameworks. She has applied Section 508, WCAG, and W3C cognitive accessibility guidance in real product environments, translating theory into practical evaluation and design methods.
Her current work examines how mobile and service-based technologies support or undermine sensemaking under interruption, memory constraints, and real-world pressure, with a particular focus on caregiving and care coordination tools.