Designing with Medical Mistrust: Perspectives from Black Older Adults in Publicly Subsidized Housing

Despite increasing interest in culturally-sensitive health technologies, medical mistrust remains largely unexplored within human-centered computing. Considered a social determinant of health, medical mistrust is the belief that healthcare providers or institutions are acting against one's best interest. This is a rational, protective response based on historical context, structural inequities, and discrimination. To center race-based medical mistrust and the lived experiences of Black older adults with low income, we conducted interviews within publicly subsidized housing in the Southern United States. Our reflexive themes describe community perspectives on health care and medical mistrust, including accreditation and embodiment, skepticism of financial motivations, and the intentions behind health AI. We provide a reflective exercise for researchers to consider their positionality in relation to community engagements, and reframe our findings through Black Feminist Thought to propose design principles for health self-management technologies for communities with historically grounded medical mistrust.

• Publication year

  2026

• Venue

  Unknown venue

• Publication date

  2026-03-03

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Medicine, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1145/3772318.3791524arXiv 2603.03416
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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