Between the Clinic and the Kitchen: A Constraint RAG Chatbot as Boundary Infrastructure for Dialysis Care
† equal contribution
Companion Publication of the 2026 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW Companion '26)
CSCW 2026 Companion · Poster
📝Overview
Dialysis patients receive dietary constraints in the clinic, based on their lab results, but have to act on them at home, in the kitchen. This poster frames a constraint-aware retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chatbot as boundary infrastructure that sits between those two worlds: it grounds its answers in each patient’s clinical lab values and the care team’s dietary rules, and translates them into everyday food decisions in the patient’s own context.
The study moved through four phases, from formative interviews with patients and clinicians, through design and deployment of the chatbot, to debriefs with stakeholders on both sides of the boundary. It complements the randomized controlled trial reported in our JMIR paper with a CSCW perspective on how such a system mediates between clinical and domestic work.
The official abstract will be posted once the paper is published. This overview is a short description of the work.
🔖BibTeX
@inproceedings{kim2026clinickitchen,
title = {Between the Clinic and the Kitchen: A Constraint RAG Chatbot as Boundary Infrastructure for Dialysis Care},
author = {Junghwan Kim and Dongseok Heo and Hee Jeong Hwang and Jeong Yun You and Bongwon Suh},
booktitle = {Companion Publication of the 2026 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW Companion '26)},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1145/3785651.3831499}
}