190 research outputs found

    bump2bump: Designing and Evaluating Technology to Promote Maternal Wellbeing in the Transition to Motherhood

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    The notion of wellbeing is synonymous with feeling competent, supported and satisfied with one’s life. Understanding how to sustain one’s own wellbeing is important at times of significant life change. The transition to motherhood is characterised by major emotional and physiological changes, which can impact on maternal subjective wellbeing and affect pregnancy outcomes. While Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has begun to address some of the challenges in the prevention and treatment of affective disorders in vulnerable perinatal groups, approaches that promote holistic maternal wellbeing in the low-risk majority have received less attention. This thesis draws on the multidisciplinary legacy of digital intervention development, utilising best practice from eHealth and HCI. Six studies using quantitative and qualitative methods were conducted. Study 1 was a systematic, interdisciplinary literature review, which proposed an integrated framework of factors involved in the successful development and evaluation of digital perinatal wellbeing resources. Study 2 used qualitative methods to explore the contextualised usage of digital resources by perinatal women. Studies 3, 4 and 5 involved the iterative development and formative evaluation of a prototype (bump2bump). Study 6 used mixed methods to explore the longitudinal, in-the-wild usage of bump2bump by a group of women as they became mothers. This thesis contributes to current discourse in HCI on how technology might be used positively and presents recommendations regarding the development and use of digital resources in first time pregnancy. Digital resources are increasingly relied upon when community services are lacking, and usage of such resources is particularly nuanced at the transition to motherhood. Design features that support users’ trust in content, facilitate face-to-face interaction with local similar others, and provide brief, practical information were found to be most important in meeting user needs. These findings can be used to inform the development and evaluation of digital perinatal wellbeing resources

    Smart and Pervasive Healthcare

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    Smart and pervasive healthcare aims at facilitating better healthcare access, provision, and delivery by overcoming spatial and temporal barriers. It represents a shift toward understanding what patients and clinicians really need when placed within a specific context, where traditional face-to-face encounters may not be possible or sufficient. As such, technological innovation is a necessary facilitating conduit. This book is a collection of chapters written by prominent researchers and academics worldwide that provide insights into the design and adoption of new platforms in smart and pervasive healthcare. With the COVID-19 pandemic necessitating changes to the traditional model of healthcare access and its delivery around the world, this book is a timely contribution

    How the Responsibility of Digital Support for Older People is Allocated? The Swedish Welfare System at the Crossroads

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    A great welfare challenge today is to promote opportunities of digitalization while limiting social inequalities from digital divides, especially for older people. While the digital divide is a dynamic problem, shifting from physical access to skills and usage, public policies to close the divide do not necessary follow. This study explores who is providing digital support in Sweden by looking at three institutions: (1) the municipal eldercare system, (2) popular education institutions, and (3) the family. The results show that the Swedish policy rely heavily on popular education and family arrangements, leaving many young-old Swedes in need of digital support without public support, while the opposite occurs for very old Swedes who are mostly consumers of welfare technologies. Issues of dependency/independency arise. Given this, the role to the Swedish welfare state needs to be re-evaluated, especially in light of rapid demographic change

    Use Cases for Design Personas : A Systematic Review and New Frontiers

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    Personas represent the needs of users in diverse populations and impact design by endearing empathy and improving communication. While personas have been lauded for their benefits, we could locate no prior review of persona use cases in design, prompting the question: how are personas actually used to achieve these benefits? To address this question, we review 95 articles containing persona application across multiple domains, and identify software development, healthcare, and higher education as the top domains that employ personas. We then present a three-stage design hierarchy of persona usage to describe how personas are used in design tasks. Finally, we assess the increasing trend of persona initiatives aimed towards social good rather than solely commercial interests. Our findings establish a roadmap of best practices for how practitioners can innovatively employ personas to increase the value of designs and highlight avenues of using personas for socially impactful purposes.© 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9157-3/22/04. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517589fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

    Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 4: Learning, Technology, Thinking

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    In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 4 includes papers from Learning, Technology and Thinking tracks of the conference

    Cellf-care: the role of smartphones in decision-making and the formation of health and self

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    Smartphone technology has transformed the process by which women understand themselves, manage their care decisions and access health information, while also creating a space for more integrated and individualized understandings of wellness. Using exploratory, semi-structured interviews (n = 27) and observation of phone use, this study examines how minority women in Boston engage with smartphones through health-related mobile applications and web searches. Drawing upon postphenomenology, I examine the way smartphones have become both a regulatory force and motivational tool in the formation of self. I argue that the integration of smartphones into user identity positions them as the primary entryway for health decision-making (Garro, 1986, 1998) and patient-clinician interactions

    Information about cancer on the internet : comparative analysis of the institutional website of AECC, GEPAC and FEFOC

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    La búsqueda de información sobre salud en internet está asociada fundamentalmente al diagnóstico de una enfermedad del usuario o de un familiar y puede considerarse la primera fuente a la que acuden tras una consulta médica (Marín-Torres et al., isanidad.com, 2015; 2012; III Barómetro PIC, 2019; INE, 2019;). Las principales barreras para el acceso y uso de la eSalud (eHealth en su terminología inglesa) tienen que ver con la legibilidad del contenido y con una pobre usabilidad de los sitios (Cline y Haynes, 2001; Kim y Xie, 2017). A esto se suma en el contexto actual el enorme volumen de datos disponible en la red que hace imprescindible desarrollar protocolos de análisis que permitan a los usuarios identificar de un modo comprensible los sitios que ofrecen información de calidad tanto en sus contenidos como en su presentación. Esta investigación plantea un análisis de las páginas web corporativas de tres instituciones españolas de reconocido prestigio —y naturaleza diversa— en el ámbito de la divulgación y prevención del cáncer: la Asociación Española Contra el Cáncer, el Grupo Español de Pacientes con Cáncer y la Fundación para la Educación Pública y la Formación en Cáncer; abordando tanto la usabilidad como el tipo de información ofrecida, con el objetivo de conocer el estado de la información en la red sobre el cáncer en España y de identificar buenas prácticas en la comunicación sobre la enfermedad.The search for health information on the Internet is fundamentally associated with the diagnosis of a disease of the user or a relative and it can be considered the first source to which they come after a medical consultation(Marín-Torres et al., isanidad.com, 2015; 2012; III Barómetro PIC, 2019; INE, 2019;).The main barriers to the access and use of eHealth have to do with the readability of the content and with a poor usability of the sites (Cline and Haynes, 2001; Kim and Xie, 2017). Added to this, the enormous volume of data available on the network in the current context is what makes it essential to develop analysis protocols that allow users to identify in a comprehensible way the sites that offer quality information both in their content and in their presentation.This research proposes an analysis of the corporate sites of three Spanish institutions of recognized prestige -and diverse nature- in the field of cancer promotion and prevention: Asociación Española Contra el Cáncer, Grupo Español de Pacientes con Cáncer and Fundación para la Educación Pública y la Formación en Cáncer; addressing both the usability and the type of information offered, in order to know the status of online information on cancer in Spain and to identify good practices in comvbmunication about the disease

    Discourse, Materiality, and the Users of Mobile Health Technologies: A Nigerian Case Study

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    mHealth, which is the use of mobile phones and other handheld information and communication technologies (ICTs), has been increasingly advocated as the solution to the problems, primarily infrastructure and personnel, facing the healthcare sector of many low-to-lower-middle-income countries (LMICs). Following a series of United Nations Foundation research and advisory publications (in 2012, 2014 and 2016) arguing that mobile phones are approaching ubiquity in Nigeria and across the world, the UN strongly recommended that LMICs undertake mHealth initiatives. Subsequently, Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Health (FMOH) published a National Health ICT Strategic Framework (Strategic Framework), 2015-2020; the rallying call of this document is that “Health ICTs will deliver universal healthcare [in Nigeria] by 2020.” The document takes a techno-optimistic position that celebrates and advocates for the creation of mHealth technologies, yet it fails to acknowledge the dire lack of the basic, necessary infrastructures for such electronic health systems, particularly in rural areas, including a scarcity of reliable electrical systems or the trained personnel who would understand how to use such technologies. This creates and sustains a healthcare precarity for poor and rural Nigerians. The rhetoric of health and medicine has taken up precarity as a framework for understanding how modern discourses contribute to the material positioning of humans with respect to technological systems. Using material-discursive critique and precarity as analytical frameworks, I tie the history of western medicine in Nigeria to the prevailing top-down approach which created widespread healthcare deserts. Using Critical (Policy) Discourse Analysis, I also examine discursive positioning of agents, e.g., “stakeholders” in the Strategic Framework and “heroes” in an mHealth technology developed and advertised locally in Nigeria, to reveal how policy documents and popular advertisements around mHealth are manipulated to camouflage these healthcare deserts with techno-optimistic rhetoric. Only when we address both the actual material conditions and the rhetorical and linguistic silencing of the people in these rural or poor areas will we be able to approach the promised benefits of mHealth systems in universal healthcare
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