Rate My Professor Chris Paton

Dr Chris Paton serves as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information Science at the University of Otago and Director of the university's Digital Health postgraduate programme. Originally trained as a medical doctor in the United Kingdom, he completed a DPhil at the University of Oxford on human-computer interaction aspects of digital health technologies. His professional journey includes serving as Clinical Lecturer at Otago, Senior Research Fellow at New Zealand's National Institute for Health Innovation, and heading a research group at Oxford's Centre for Tropical Medicine focusing on digital health in low-resource settings. For the past three years up to 2023, he worked part-time at Otago alongside his Oxford role. He also holds an Executive MBA from the University of Auckland and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society.

Paton's research specializations encompass digital health systems, artificial intelligence in healthcare, virtual and extended reality for training, mobile health interventions, and human-centred design to enhance clinical usability and equity. Key projects include smartphone apps for neonatal resuscitation training and pneumonia diagnosis by rural healthcare workers in Kenya, AI-driven mobile sensors for intensive care monitoring in Vietnam, and people-focused telehealth services in New Zealand funded by Health Research Council grants. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, cited more than 4,000 times. Select publications are "Mobile Health (mHealth) in Low- and Middle-Income Countries" (2022), "Open Source Digital Health Software for Resilient, Accessible and Equitable Healthcare Systems" (2022), "HCI-modelling for improving the clinical usability of digital health technologies" (2024), "Extended reality technologies in child health education for undergraduate healthcare students: a scoping review" (2025), and "Reporting guideline for the early stage clinical evaluation of decision support systems driven by artificial intelligence: DECIDE-AI" (2022). Paton developed the LIFE smartphone and VR simulator for medical emergencies, winner of the "Saving Lives at Birth" and "VR for Impact" awards. He presented at the G20 Health Working Group Digital Health event on AI opportunities and serves as Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Digital Health & AI.