5,761 research outputs found

    Experts evaluation of usability for digital solutions directed at older adults: a scoping review of reviews

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    Background: it is important to standardize the evaluation and reporting procedures across usability studies to guide researchers, facilitate comparisons, and promote high-quality studies. A first step to standardizing is to have an overview of how experts-based usability evaluation studies are reported across the literature. Objectives: to describe and synthesize the procedures of usability evaluation by experts that are being reported to conduct inspection usability assessments of digital solutions relevant for older adults. Methods: a scoping review of reviews was performed using a five-stage methodology to identify and describe relevant literature published between 2009 and 2020 as follows: i) identification of the research question; ii) identification of relevant studies; iii) select studies for review; iv) charting of data from selected literature; and v) collation, summary, and report of results. The research was conducted on five electronic databases: PubMed, ACM Digital Library, IEEE, Scopus, and Web of Science. The articles that met the inclusion criteria were identified, and data extracted for further analysis, including evaluators, current usability inspection methods, and instruments to support usability inspection methods. Results: a total of 3958 articles were identified. After a detailed screening, 12 reviews matched the eligibility criteria. Conclusion: overall, we found a variety of unstandardized procedures and a lack of detail on some important aspects of the assessment, including a thorough description of the evaluators and of the instruments used to facilitate the inspection evaluation such as heuristics checklists. These findings suggest the need for a consensus framework on the experts’ assessment of usability that informs researchers and allows standardization of procedures.in publicatio

    Information Technologies for Cognitive Decline

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    Information technology (IT) is used to establish a diagnosis and provide treatment for people with cognitive decline. The condition affects many before it becomes clear that more permanent changes, like dementia, could be noticed. Those who search for information are exposed to lots of information and different technologies which they need to make sense of and eventually use to help themselves. In this research literature and information available on the Internet were systematically analyzed to present methods used for diagnosis and treatment. Methods used for diagnosis are self-testing, sensors, Virtual Reality (VR), and brain imaging. Methods used for treatment are games, websites with information and media, Virtual Reality (VR), sensors, and robots. The resulting concept of knowledge was the basis of an artifact whose main goal was to present the facts to the broad public. This implied that a user-friendly artifact was developed through three iterations using the Design Science framework. A total of nine users and IT usability experts have evaluated the artifact returning the SUS score of 85,83 for users and 87,5 for IT usability experts. Nielsen´s heuristics were assessed by IT usability experts only, returning an average score of 4,28. The general response was positive regarding both the content and the attempt to present methods used in cognitive decline. It reminds to be seen how to bring this knowledge to those who are most affected by the decline.Masteroppgave i informasjonsvitenskapINFO390MASV-INF

    Unit Costs of Health and Social Care 2014

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    E-government and Digital Divide in Hail City: a Quantitative, Older Adults Study

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    The subject of information and communication technologies adoption, Internet and e-government services in particular, have been widely investigated by researchers. It is an indication of the significant roles that can be brought to individuals and societies by such advanced technologies in which enhancing quality of life is the ultimate goal. Unfortunately, many groups within societies are not gaining the advantages and benefits of the Internet and e-government because they are less receptive to ICTs. This has created a phenomenon known as the digital divide. Amongst these groups are the older adults. The rising attention towards the elderly is due to the increasing life expectancy. Thanks to health technological advancements and life style improvements, which are leading to better qualities of life, countries around the globe have older adults population rate larger than ever before. Saudi Arabia is no exception, as demographic characteristics have been changing in which life span is increasing and fertility is decreasing. However, literature of older adults and technology adoption, particularly adoption of Internet and e-government lacks the context of developing countries and the Arab world. Therefore, using this as a motivation, this study aims to identify, explain and understand the adoption, use and diffusion of e-government services within the older adults population (50+) of a vicinity in Saudi Arabia. The study uses a quantitative research method along with a positivist epistemology. The data collection technique involved distributing survey questionnaires to households’ residents (50+) in Hail city (area and simple random sampling). A small-scale pilot study was initially used (n=257) to validate and enhance the survey questions, followed by a wide-scale final study (n=937). Findings revealed that with regards to Internet adoption, age-based, gender-based, education-based and health-based digital divides do exist within the elderly population. It was also found by model analysis that elderlies’ intentions of whether to use or not use e-government services are considerably impacted by attitudinal, subjective norms, control and trustworthiness factors, excluding the two factors of image and trust in government, which showed insignificance. The study makes positive contributions to related literature, policy makers and industry. Finally, due to the restraints of time, finance and manpower, this study examined only a small portion of the whole population of Hail city; therefore, generalisations of findings cannot be claimed

    Development of a UK online 24-h dietary assessment tool:Myfood24

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    Abstract: Assessment of diet in large epidemiological studies can be costly and time consuming. An automated dietary assessment system could potentially reduce researcher burden by automatically coding food records. myfood24 (Measure Your Food on One Day) an online 24-hour dietary assessment tool (with the flexibility to be used for multiple 24hour-dietary recalls or as a food diary), has been developed for use in the UK population. Development of myfood24 was a multi-stage process. Focus groups conducted with three age groups, adolescents (11-18 yrs) (n = 28), adults (19-64 yrs) (n= 24) and older adults (≥65 years) (n= 5) informed the development of the tool, and usability testing was conducted with beta (adolescents n= 14, adults n= 8, older adults n= 1) and live (adolescents n= 70, adults n= 20, older adults n= 4) versions. Median system usability scale (SUS) scores (measured on a scale of 0-100) in adolescents and adults were marginal for the beta version (adolescents median SUS =66, interquartile range (IQR) =20; adults median SUS=68, IQR=40) and good for the live version (adolescents median SUS= 73, IQR =22; adults median SUS= 80, IQR=25). myfood24 is the first online 24 hour dietary recall tool for use with different age groups in the UK. Usability testing indicates that myfood24 is suitable for use in UK adolescents and adults

    Optimization and validation of automated hippocampal subfield segmentation across the lifespan

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    Automated segmentation of hippocampal (HC) subfields from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is gaining popularity, but automated procedures that afford high speed and reproducibility have yet to be extensively validated against the standard, manual morphometry. We evaluated the concurrent validity of an automated method for hippocampal subfields segmentation (automated segmentation of hippocampal subfields, ASHS; Yushkevich et al.,2015b) using a customized atlas of the HC body, with manual morphometry as a standard. We built a series of customized atlases comprising the entorhinal cortex (ERC) and subfields of the HC body from manually segmented images, and evaluated the correspondence of automated segmentations with manual morphometry. In samples with age ranges of 6–24 and 62–79 years, 20 participants each, we obtained validity coefficients (intraclass correlations, ICC) and spatial overlap measures (dice similarity coefficient) that varied substantially across subfields. Anterior and posterior HC body evidenced the greatest discrepancies between automated and manual segmentations. Adding anterior and posterior slices for atlas creation and truncating automated output to the ranges manually defined by multiple neuroanatomical landmarks substantially improved the validity of automated segmentation, yielding ICC above 0.90 for all subfields and alleviating systematic bias. We cross-validated the developed atlas on an independent sample of 30 healthy adults (age 31–84) and obtained good to excellent agreement: ICC (2) = 0.70–0.92. Thus, with described customization steps implemented by experts trained in MRI neuroanatomy, ASHS shows excellent concurrent validity, and can become a promising method for studying age-related changes in HC subfield volumes

    Complex Decision Support for Older Adults: Effects of Information Visualization on Decision Performance

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    Older adults are faced with complex decision tasks that impose high working memory demands. A representative task is choosing a prescription drug plan from a multitude of options that must be evaluated along many factors. The combined effect of the quantity of complex information, and reduced working memory capacity puts older adults at a disadvantage. However, research with younger adults suggests that the working memory burden of decision tasks can be reduced using well-designed, graphical decision aids (i.e., environmental supports). The current study examined the use of environmental supports to support complex decision-making for older adults. Two experiments were conducted; experiment 1 assessed two information visualizations (color and size) on their ability to minimize the working memory demands of the task. Results from experiment 1 suggest that the color information visualization does in fact minimize working memory demand by replacing cognitive comparisons with perceptual comparisons. The second experiment validated the efficacy of the color information visualization in an older adult group. Findings suggest that the use of color to visualize information can successfully ameliorate working memory demand for direct comparisons, but not for complex integration tasks. Finally, the results suggest that information visualizations that rely on perceptual abilities rather than cognitive abilities may help improve older adults\u27 decision making accuracy

    An Optimization Analysis of the Subject Directory System on the Medlineplus Portal - An Investigation of Mental Health, Children, Teenagers, and Older Adults Related Health Topics

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    The Internet is a common means for people to search for health information. The subject directory of MedlinePlus offers Internet searchers a browsing environment so that those seekers could start from a broad term and refine their search terms to meet their real information needs, thus resulting in a better information search. For those novice users who are not familiar with relevant domain knowledge, MedlinePlus’s directory can be of great assistance and enable the portal to adopt to a more general population. Such a subject directory system and its involved health topics in the MedlinePlus portal formed a network where a specific research methodology, social network analysis, is applicable. In this study, four health topic groups – mental health, children, teenagers, and older adults - were selected as the focus for the investigation toward the subject directory on the MedlinePlus portal. This study applied social network analysis to explore the health topic directories and connection patterns among the health topics that comprised the subject directory of the MedlinePlus portal, and identified the influential topics (i.e., those health topics which play more important roles than others in connecting different topics) among the topic networks. As a result, different recommendations were made toward mental health, children, teenagers, and older adults related health topics, respectively. New optimized structural networks were suggested to be built for each of the four health topic subcategories according to the similarity values calculated through the cosine similarity measure in terms of the textual information contained in health topics’ Web pages, as well as the key nodes identified in the networks of health topics. Evaluations were later conducted to compare the original and optimized structural networks of the four health topic groups regarding their topics’ new similarity values. Newly identified influential health topics were verified to have improved the overall semantic connections among the whole networks. Last but not least, the recommendation results were evaluated by two health field experts and the evaluation outcomes proved that the recommendations suggested in this study were consistent with the opinions generated by health professionals. The findings of this research will provide suggestions to optimize and enhance the current navigation guidance system in MedlinePlus, improve the information searching effectiveness among the portal users, offer insights to public health portal creators, and support other researchers focusing on subject directory systems

    Behavioral and Mental Health in Nevada

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    The Nevada Division of Public and Behavioral Health is responsible for providing public and mental health services to people living in or visiting the State. The Division is organized into four branches: Community Services Branch, Regulatory and Planning Services Branch, Clinical Services Branch and Administrative Services Branch. The Clinical Services Branch provides statewide inpatient, outpatient, and community-based public and mental health services. State employees provide mental health services, and contract providers deliver substance use services. Mental health services are additionally organized by age and geography. Adults with mental disorders are treated statewide through the Division of Public and Behavioral Health. Children with mental disorders are served through the Division of Child and Family Services within the populous urban counties (Washoe, Clark and Carson City) and the Division of Public and Behavioral Health across the 14 rural and frontier counties. Services are supported through Medicaid, the Nevada General Fund, and Federal grants. The Division of Public and Behavioral Health is located within the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services, under the Executive Branch of the State, and serves as its Public Health Authority and Mental Health Commissioner. By statute, the Commission on Behavioral Health is responsible for the following: establishing policies to ensure development and administration of services for persons with mental illness, persons with intellectual disabilities and related conditions, and persons with substance use conditions; reviewing programs and finances of the Division; and providing reports to the Governor and Legislature regarding the quality of care and treatment provided to individuals with mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and substance use disorders [Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS) 433.314]. Historically, the governance structure of Nevada’s behavioral and mental health system has been centralized at the state level with limited involvement at regional and local levels. A policy study conducted during 2014 identified Nevada as one of only four states in the country that directly operates community-based mental health services (Kenny C. Guinn Center for Policy Priorities, Mental Health Governance: A Review of State Models & Guide for Nevada Decisions Makers, December, 2014). During that same year, the State began to consider ways to move from its centralized governance structure to a more localized model involving regional, county and city entities. A key consideration was a growing recognition that increasing the State’s responsiveness to the unique needs of individual communities is crucial. Nevada’s plan to restructure the governance of its state mental health system is not without challenges. For example, the numbers of Nevada residents covered by Medicaid benefits almost doubled when Medicaid coverage was expanded by Governor Brian Sandoval under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) during 2014, increasing from 351,315 persons in 2013 to 654,442 individuals in 2015 (Woodard and Nevada Division of Health Care Financing and Policy, 2016). On its face, the increase in numbers of residents covered by Medicaid benefits is a positive outcome. However, the existing mental health provider network was not adequate to serve the increase in numbers of individuals covered. As detailed in later sections in this chapter, the increase in health care coverage appears to have impacted the frequency with which Nevada residents used health care services, most notably hospital emergency departments and inpatient facilities. Thus, the dual influences of increased health care coverage, and limited access to appropriate and optimal mental health services are reflected in the dramatic increase in residents’ utilization of emergency department services for a wide range of mental health-related conditions during 2015, after the expansion of Medicaid during 2014. Also discussed in later sections is the fact that almost all of the State qualifies as a mental health professional shortage area (Health Resources and Services Administration, HRSA). Therefore, moving from a primarily centralized or state control model to a local control model will require accommodation for the shortages in mental health professionals within communities that lie outside the State’s urban centers
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