Fiona Andreallo is an EC Fellow in the School of Design and social context at RMIT with a research focus on technological-human relationships. She has published internationally on the topics of digitally networked social relationships, social robots-human relationships and communication, social robot companionship as well as technology use in aged care and dementia care.

Fiona’s Communication Design research and publications span across faculties of Health, Engineering, Design and The Arts engaging with communities. At The Art Gallery of NSW, she worked on a project designing more inclusive community access for people living with Dementia and their carers. She has also previously worked on research projects with MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour & Development, and Age care institutes including Hammond Care (Australia) developing personalised music prescriptions for people living with Dementia as well as educational interactive video to make the findings accessible to families and carers.

Fiona’s current work extends from her book, to mapping and understanding social robots, intelligent systems and algorithms in aged and dementia care. Focusing on algorithms as neither intelligent nor artificial but designed by humans and representative of cultural ideologies, Fiona has begun to map the ways technology can be understood as practices of Touch. Touch is an important but often overlooked element of health, well-being and communication. The mapping of Touch aims toward caring futures as well as providing a way to examine the ways technology both enables and constrains humans.