Hospital 5.0: Enhancing Nurses with the Use of Wearables

The idea of enhancing humans physically, cognitively, and psychologically is promoted by transhumanists. It requires from technology to focus on one's individual abilities so as to improve them beyond what is possible at the natural state. While enhancement was long the realm of cyborgs and referred to a lonely use of technology, this concept could also be applied to organisations. This paper proposes an analysis of the concept of 'enhancement' applied to the workforce and demonstrates how one could design an intervention to enhance nursing staff in hospitals. Dimensions to consider when developing technology for enhancement in the workplace are identified

Analysis and design of individual information systems to support health behavior change

As a wide-ranging socio-technical transformation, the digitalization has significantly influenced the world, bringing opportunities and challenges to our lives. Despite numerous benefits like the possibility to stay connected with people around the world, the increasing dispersion and use of digital technologies and media (DTM) pose risks to individuals’ well-being and health. Rising demands emerging from the digital world have been linked to digital stress, that is, stress directly or indirectly resulting from DTM (Ayyagari et al. 2011; Ragu-Nathan et al. 2008; Tarafdar et al. 2019; Weil and Rosen 1997), potentially intensifying individuals’ overall exposure to stress. Individuals experiencing this adverse consequence of digitalization are at elevated risk of developing severe mental health impairments (Alhassan et al. 2018; Haidt and Allen 2020; Scott et al. 2017), which is why various scholars emphasize that research should place a stronger focus on analyzing and shaping the role of the individual in a digital world, pursuing instrumental as well as humanistic objectives (Ameen et al. 2021; Baskerville 2011b). Information Systems (IS) research has long placed emphasis on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in organizations, viewing an information system as the socio-technical system that emerges from individuals’ interaction with DTM in organizations. However, socio-technical information systems, as the essence of the IS discipline (Lee 2004; Sarker et al. 2019), are also present in different social contexts from private life. Acknowledging the increasing private use of DTM, such as smartphones and social networks, IS scholars have recently intensified their efforts to understand the human factor of IS (Avison and Fitzgerald 1991; Turel et al. 2021). A framework recently proposed by Matt et al. (2019) suggests three research angles: analyzing individuals’ behavior associated with their DTM use, analyzing what consequences arise from their DTM use behavior, and designing new technologies that promote positive or mitigate negative effects of individuals’ DTM use. Various recent studies suggest that individuals’ behavior seems to be an important lever influencing the outcomes of their DTM use (Salo et al. 2017; Salo et al. 2020; Weinstein et al. 2016). Therefore, this dissertation aims to contribute to IS research targeting the facilitation of a healthy DTM use behavior. It explores the use behavior, consequences, and design of DTM for individuals' use with the objective to deliver humanistic value by increasing individuals' health through supporting a behavior change related to their DTM use. The dissertation combines behavioral science and design science perspectives and applies pluralistic methodological approaches from qualitative (e.g., interviews, prototyping) and quantitative research (e.g., survey research, field studies), including mixed-methods approaches mixing both. Following the framework from Matt et al. (2019), the dissertation takes three perspectives therein: analyzing individuals’ behavior, analyzing individuals’ responses to consequences of DTM use, and designing information systems assisting DTM users. First, the dissertation presents new descriptive knowledge on individuals’ behavior related to their use of DTM. Specifically, it investigates how individuals behave when interacting with DTM, why they behave the way they do, and how their behavior can be influenced. Today, a variety of digital workplace technologies offer employees different ways of pursuing their goals or performing their tasks (Köffer 2015). As a result, individuals exhibit different behaviors when interacting with these technologies. The dissertation analyzes what interactional roles DTM users can take at the digital workplace and what may influence their behavior. It uses a mixed-methods approach and combines a quantitative study building on trace data from a popular digital workplace suite and qualitative interviews with users of this digital workplace suite. The empirical analysis yields eight user roles that advance the understanding of users’ behavior at the digital workplace and first insights into what factors may influence this behavior. A second study adds another perspective and investigates how habitual behavior can be changed by means of DTM design elements. Real-time feedback has been discussed as a promising way to do so (Schibuola et al. 2016; Weinmann et al. 2016). In a field experiment, employees working at the digital workplace are provided with an external display that presents real-time feedback on their office’s indoor environmental quality. The experiment examines if and to what extent the feedback influences their ventilation behavior to understand the effect of feedback as a means of influencing individuals’ behavior. The results suggest that real-time feedback can effectively alter individuals’ behavior, yet the feedback’s effectiveness reduces over time, possibly as a result of habituation to the feedback. Second, the dissertation presents new descriptive and prescriptive knowledge on individuals’ ways to mitigate adverse consequences arising from the digitalization of individuals. A frequently discussed consequence that digitalization has on individuals is digital stress. Although research efforts strive to determine what measures individuals can take to effectively cope with digital stress (Salo et al. 2017; Salo et al. 2020; Weinert 2018), further understanding of individuals’ coping behavior is needed (Weinert 2018). A group at high risk of suffering from the adverse effects of digital stress is adolescents because they grow up using DTM daily and are still developing their identity, acquiring mental strength, and adopting essential social skills. To facilitate a healthy DTM use, the dissertation explores what strategies adolescents use to cope with the demands of their DTM use. Combining a qualitative and a quantitative study, it presents 30 coping responses used by adolescents, develops five factors underlying adolescents’ activation of coping responses, and identifies gender- and age-related differences in their coping behavior. Third, the dissertation presents new prescriptive knowledge on the design of individual information systems supporting individuals in understanding and mitigating their perceived stress. Facilitated by the sensing capabilities of modern mobile devices, it explores the design and development of mobile systems that assess stress and support individuals in coping with stress by initiating a change of stress-related behavior. Since there is currently limited understanding of how to develop such systems, this dissertation explores various facets of their design and development. As a first step, it presents the development of a prototype aiming for life-integrated stress assessment, that is, the mobile sensor-based assessment of an individual’s stress without interfering with their daily routines. Data collected with the prototype yields a stress model relating sensor data to individuals’ perception of stress. To deliver a more generalized perspective on mobile stress assessment, the dissertation further presents a literature- and experience-based design theory comprising a design blueprint, design requirements, design principles, design features, and a discussion of potentially required trade-offs. Mobile stress assessment may be used for the development of mobile coping assistants. Aiming to assist individuals in effectively coping with stress and preventing future stress, a mobile coping assistant should recommend adequate coping strategies to the stressed individual in real-time or execute targeted actions within a defined scope of action automatically. While the implementation of a mobile coping assistant is yet up to future research, the dissertation presents an abstract design and algorithm for selecting appropriate coping strategies. To sum up, this dissertation contributes new knowledge on the digitalization of individuals to the IS knowledge bases, expanding both descriptive and prescriptive knowledge. Through the combination of diverse methodological approaches, it delivers knowledge on individuals’ behavior when using DTM, on the mitigation of consequences that may arise from individuals’ use of DTM, and on the design of individual information systems with the goal of facilitating a behavior change, specifically, regarding individuals’ coping with stress. Overall, the research contained in this dissertation may promote the development of digital assistants that support individuals’ in adopting a healthy DTM use behavior and thereby contribute to shaping a socio-technical environment that creates more benefit than harm for all individuals

Language Learning Anxiety: a bometric investigation of stress and language learning using wearable devices

As Sapolsky (2015) notes, stress research has long been characterised by definitional debates that gave rise to a lack of agreement between theorists. An example of this definitional confusion can be seen in the area of Language Learning Anxiety, where there appears to be confusion in the literature over terms such as anxiety and stress. This study investigated the link between stress and language learning using wearable devices measuring heart rate variance, as a means of establishing the feasibility of using this new technology in stress research. The results indicate that the contextualised longitudinal data delivered by wearable devices mitigates against the current dominant paradigm in Language Learning Anxiety, which postulates a straight-line negative correlation between stress and learning. Instead, the inverted U stress relationship proposed by theorists such as Hebb (1955) seem to be a better fit for the data. The nature of the contextualised data generated in this study allowed for comparisons between participants’ stress readings in academic contexts, such as language and non-language classes, and their free time. The findings suggest that certain long-held assumptions about heightened stress in academic contexts may not hold true. While the findings of this study did not reach the levels of statistical significance, they constitute proof of concept that the type of contextualised data delivered by wearable devices may allow for a new type of stress research that incorporates contextualising longitudinal perspectives on participants’ stress levels. In this study the inclusion of contextualising data led to fundamentally different conclusions about the relationship between stress and language learning. The same may be true of many areas of stress research. The findings presented in this study have broader paradigm-altering implications not only for educational policy, but also for stress research in general. Perhaps equally important was that the type of data delivered by wearable devices was qualitatively different from that normally associated with quantitative studies. This presented challenges in data analysis in this study, but also opens intriguing possibilities regarding a means of reconciling the qualitative and quantitative split in research modalities. The use of wearable devices is not without issues, and some of the issues, ranging from practical considerations to ethical conundrums, are presented for the reader’s consideration and to inform future researchers regarding potential pitfalls.Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Humanities, Psychology, 202