Collaborative and Adaptive Framework for Telediagnosis and Prescriptions in Herbal Medicine

Herbal medicine has been an age long tradition for the treatment and cure of diseases globally. Previous researches on telediagnosis and prescriptions in orthodox medicine studied applications of modern technological devices which could improve health care services. However, there is yet to be an exhaustive study on the audio-visual technological framework for telediagnosis and prescription in herbal medicine.  Hence, the research developed a collaborative and adaptive framework for telediagnosis and prescriptions in herbal medicine. The framework and its system were developed consisting of multimedia features for videoconferencing; ability to record, capture and replay consultations; and capacity for editing, data compression and short message service amongst herbal tele-consultants. The system was experimented on Ladoke Akintola University of Technology hotspot network for a period of twenty one days in order to determine the system’s average packet loss rate and packet transmitted with five herbal tele-consultant nodes (node-1, node2, node3, node4 and node5). All nodes were allotted Internet Protocol addresses through which the intending herbal tele-consultant(s) could be connected to the telediagnosis videoconference session. Three performance metrics, System Reliability Index (SRI), System Degree of Relevance (SDR), and System Ease of Usage (SEU) were used to carry out subject to the evaluation of the system by administering one hundred questionnaires herbal consultants to harvest users’ perception of the system based on a Likert rating scale. The results obtained from telediagnosis session showed that the system recorded packet loss rates of 3.46, 3.13, 3.42, 3.61 and 3.36% at node1, node2, node3, node4 and node5, respectively. Also, the average packets of 3123.2, 5017.6, 5683.2, 4454.4 and 4249.6 bits were obtained at node1, node2, node3, node4 and node5, respectively. The summary of the subjected evaluation of the system indicate that the respondent’s response means of 3.20, 2.88. and 3.42 were obtained for the SRI, SDR and SEU, respectively on a rating scale of 1 to 5

Intelligent protocol adaptation for enhanced medical e-collaboration

Copyright @ 2003 AAAIDistributed multimedia e-health applications have a set specific requirements which must be taken into account effective use is to be made of the limited resources provided by public telecommunication networks. Moreover, there an architectural gap between the provision of network-level Quality of Service (QoS) and user requirements of e-health applications. In this paper, we address the problem bridging this gap from a multi-attribute decision-making perspective in the context of a remote collaborative environment for back pain treatment. We propose intelligent mechanism that integrates user- related requirements with the more technical characterisation Quality of Service. We show how our framework is capable of suggesting appropriately tailored transmission protocols, by incorporating user requirements in the remote delivery e-health solutions

Designing Cost-Effective Telemedicine Camps for Underprivileged Individuals in Less Developed Countries: A Decomposed Affordance-Effectivity Framework

Free telemedicine camps (telecamps) are emergent joint initiatives of healthcare organizations, national and local governments, and not-for-profit nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) with the goal of alleviating the health divide for underprivileged individuals in rural areas of less developed countries. Our study seeks to understand the effectiveness of physician-patient communication at telecamps with several salient characteristics: rural underprivileged patients, physicians in remote cities, and frugal telemedicine technology—specifically, videoconferencing—deployed in Hospitals on Wheels and appropriated by operators. We adopt a multiple-actor perspective, propose a decomposed affordance-effectivity framework, and combine variance and process perspectives to examine the phenomenon of interest. We collaborated with Apollo Hospitals, a leading hospital system in India, and collected multisource data from two major telecamps in rural South India. Based on an analysis of survey data from 216 telecamp participants through a variance perspective, we found support for the fit of patient-perceived media richness with two contingency factors—(1) disease diagnostic complexity and (2) patient healthcare needs fulfillment—in influencing patient satisfaction with teleconsultation. Based on an analysis of 46 sessions of teleconsultation video archives through a process perspective, we found that technology appropriation is realized through verbal and nonverbal communication events between patients and physicians, with on-site operators playing multiple roles that serve as “compensatory user effectivity.” Our findings yield theoretical and practical implications for how effective telemedicine encounters using frugal technologies can be designed in combination with other cost-effective support personnel resources to broaden healthcare access for underprivileged individuals in less developed countries and, more broadly, to actualize technology affordances in use situations involving multiple actors

Intelligent multimedia communication for enhanced medical e-collaboration in back pain treatment

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2004 SAGE PublicationsRemote, multimedia-based, collaboration in back pain treatment is an option which only recently has come to the attention of clinicians and IT providers. The take-up of such applications will inevitably depend on their ability to produce an acceptable level of service over congested and unreliable public networks. However, although the problem of multimedia application-level performance is closely linked to both the user perspective of the experience as well as to the service provided by the underlying network, it is rarely studied from an integrated viewpoint. To alleviate this problem, we propose an intelligent mechanism that integrates user-related requirements with the more technical characterization of quality of service, obtaining a priority order of low-level quality of service parameters, which would ensure that user-centred quality of perception is maintained at an optimum level. We show how our framework is capable of suggesting appropriately tailored transmission protocols, by incorporating user requirements in the remote delivery of e-health solutions

Telehealth for expanding the reach of early autism training to parents.

Although there is consensus that parents should be involved in interventions designed for young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), parent participation alone does not ensure consistent, generalized gains in children's development. Barriers such as costly intervention, time-intensive sessions, and family life may prevent parents from using the intervention at home. Telehealth integrates communication technologies to provide health-related services at a distance. A 12 one-hour per week parent intervention program was tested using telehealth delivery with nine families with ASD. The goal was to examine its feasibility and acceptance for promoting child learning throughout families' daily play and caretaking interactions at home. Parents became skilled at using teachable moments to promote children's spontaneous language and imitation skills and were pleased with the support and ease of telehealth learning. Preliminary results suggest the potential of technology for helping parents understand and use early intervention practices more often in their daily interactions with children

Telemental Health Services for Youth in Rural Areas: Meeting Service Gaps and Best Practices

Literature review that explores the benefits of providing telemental health services to youth, with a particular focus on how this delivery format may help close service gaps in rural areas. In addition, this review identifies several common challenges in providing and implementing telemental health services, best practice recommendations for providers and agencies to address these challenges, and strategies state agencies can take to encourage the use and expansion of telemental health services

Evaluating the Efficacy and Acceptability of Videoconferencing in School-Based Behavioral Consultation

School-based behavioral consultation is a way of providing psychological services to students through their teachers. This indirect service delivery model has been shown to be effective for improving academic and behavioral concerns. Typically, school-based behavioral consultation is conducted face-to-face (in-vivo) between consultants (psychologists) and consultee’s (teachers); however, current technologies have provided an alternative medium to communicate, via videoconferencing. Videoconferencing has been shown to be an effective alternative to face-to-face communication across many different practice domains and applications. Videoconferencing in schools, particularly for school-based behavioral consultation, may be a viable alternative. The proposed study evaluated the efficacy and acceptability of videoconferencing with teachers as an alternative means of conducting the problem identification interview of school-based behavioral consultation. A school psychology doctoral student interviewed teachers on two occasions (face-to-face and via videoconferencing) to obtain information about student problem behavior. The videoconferencing interviews were conducted across iPads using the videoconferencing software FaceTime. All interviews were video recorded and transcribed into text to code verbalizations, using the Consultation Analysis Record (CAR). Frequencies of verbalizations were totaled on the Consultation Analysis checklist (CAC) into 14 required categories. Data from the CAC was used to evaluate the efficacy of the interviews. Additionally, teachers completed two brief measures, the Fast Form of the Technology Acceptability Model (FF-TAM) and the Distance Communication Comfort Scale (DCCS) pre and post interviews. Data from The FF-TAM and DCCS was used to evaluate the acceptability of videoconferencing. Finally, moderators of the acceptability of videoconferencing were evaluated using a multiple regression analysis

Mutual Shaping of Tele-Healthcare Practice: Exploring Community Perspectives on Telehealth Technologies in Northern and Indigenous Contexts

In Canada, northern and Indigenous communities face well documented challenges to accessing healthcare services prompting the urgent need to adopt alternative and innovative solutions to overcome barriers of limited access due to geographic distance, physician shortages, limited resources, and high cost of service delivery. Telehealth – the means of delivering health care services and information across distance – promises to augment services to address some of these barriers and has been increasingly relied upon to bridge healthcare service gaps. Despite the promise of telehealth, notable utilization barriers and structural constraints remain that challenge long-term sustainability. Little is known about how well these technologies work from community telehealth users’ perspectives. Current work in the area has tended to focus on the increased efficiency and cost effectiveness of telehealth in facilitating healthcare services, with less focus on users’ perspectives obscuring the important roles played by users and technologies. In sum, more work needs to be done to present a complete picture of users’ experiences and community needs – a gap this dissertation aims to tackle. In doing so, this research captures a snapshot of community perspectives from four Northern Saskatchewan communities, drawing attention to users’ experiences in relation to the social and technical factors shaping telehealth use. Working in partnership with the communities of Hatchet Lake Denesuline First Nation, the Northern Villages of Île-à-la-Crosse and Pinehouse Lake, and the Town of La Ronge, and external stakeholders/knowledge users working directly with these communities, this work resulted in valuable insights into the user-technology interface. Emerging from community concerns with accessing healthcare services and education/training, the goal of this project was to better understand strengths and barriers for telehealth use. Methodologically, the personal accounts and lived experiences of telehealth users were explored using qualitative methods grounded in Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and decolonizing methodologies utilizing Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) that is drawn from interpretive-constructivist epistemological frameworks. In-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews/focus groups with 24 telehealth users, field notes and general observations provided the basis for data collection, and NVivo 12 was used to organize, iteratively code and analyze community insights. Thematic analysis and socio-technical mapping explored themes across community contexts and provided understanding of the interrelationship of shared and unique insights whereby community telehealth users’ voices guided interpretations. This dissertation highlights the importance of community collaborations and identifies the strengths and barriers for utilizing telehealth within northern and Indigenous contexts. Using theoretical frameworks drawn from Science and Technology Studies (STS), this dissertation makes the argument that users and technologies play significant roles in shaping tele-healthcare practice – a mutually co-constitutive relationship embedded within larger socio-structural systems that pose varying constraints. Analysis revealed that users and technologies mutually shape tele-healthcare practices and care experiences – i.e. technologies shape patients’ and local/remote providers’ use of the system in enabling/constraining ways and users shape technologies through reconfiguration or “tinkering”. A mutual shaping approach following the relational/performative view of socio-technical agency serves as a pathway for examining socio-cultural factors shaping how technologies are designed, implemented, and used, and alternatively how technologies shape practice and meanings of socio-technical spaces. Further, it is argued that understanding the context in which telehealth technologies are situated and experienced will be increasingly critical as technological systems play greater roles in service delivery