Factors that influence public engagement with eHealth: a literature review

Purpose: Public engagement with eHealth is generally viewed as beneficial. However, despite the potential benefits, public engagement with eHealth services remains variable. This article explores reasons for this variability through a review of published international literature. Methods: A focused search, conducted in January 2009, of three bibliographic databases, MEDLINE, CINAHL and EMBASE, returned 2622 unique abstracts. Results: Fifty articles met the inclusion criteria for the review. Four main types of eHealth service were identified: health information on the Internet; custom-made online health information; online support; and telehealth. Public engagement with these services appears to depend on a number of factors: characteristics of users; technological issues; characteristics of eHealth services; social aspects of use; and eHealth services in use. Conclusions: Recommendations for policy makers, developers, users and health professionals, include: targeting efforts towards those underserved by eHealth; improving access; tailoring services to meet the needs of a broader range of users; exploiting opportunities for social computing; and clarifying of the role of health professionals in endorsement, promotion and facilitation

An End-to-End Conversational Style Matching Agent

We present an end-to-end voice-based conversational agent that is able to engage in naturalistic multi-turn dialogue and align with the interlocutor's conversational style. The system uses a series of deep neural network components for speech recognition, dialogue generation, prosodic analysis and speech synthesis to generate language and prosodic expression with qualities that match those of the user. We conducted a user study (N=30) in which participants talked with the agent for 15 to 20 minutes, resulting in over 8 hours of natural interaction data. Users with high consideration conversational styles reported the agent to be more trustworthy when it matched their conversational style. Whereas, users with high involvement conversational styles were indifferent. Finally, we provide design guidelines for multi-turn dialogue interactions using conversational style adaptation

Improving Direction-Giving Through Utilization of an RFID-Enabled Kiosk

This paper presents an RFID-enabled module for an electronic kiosk physical user interface which provides personalized information retrieval. The system builds on research in direction-giving by streamlining the process of the direction-giving phase and minimizing the introduction and closure phases, thereby providing the user with a quicker transaction for personalized information. The RFID technology also provides potential for greater security and privacy for the user of the kiosk system as compared to traditional magnetic strip methods. The developed RFID-enabled system is built on top of a current production informational kiosk utilized for a building directory, which was used for initial testing and evaluation

Security, Trust and Privacy (STP) Model for Federated Identity and Access Management (FIAM) Systems

The federated identity and access management systems facilitate the home domain organization users to access multiple resources (services) in the foreign domain organization by web single sign-on facility. In federated environment the user’s authentication is performed in the beginning of an authentication session and allowed to access multiple resources (services) until the current session is active. In current federated identity and access management systems the main security concerns are: (1) In home domain organization machine platforms bidirectional integrity measurement is not exist, (2) Integrated authentication (i.e., username/password and home domain machine platforms mutual attestation) is not present and (3) The resource (service) authorization in the foreign domain organization is not via the home domain machine platforms bidirectional attestation

TwoKind Authentication: Protecting Private Information in Untrustworthy Environments (Extended Version)

We propose and evaluate TwoKind Authentication, a simple and effective technique that allows users to limit access to their private information in untrustworthy environments. Users often log in to Internet sites from insecure computers, and more recently have started divulging their email passwords to social-networking sites, thereby putting their private communications at risk. To mitigate this problem, we explore the use of multiple authenticators for the same account that are associated with specific sets of privileges. In its simplest form, TwoKind features two modes of authentication, a low and a high authenticator. By using a low authenticator, users can signal to the server they are in an untrusted environment, following which the server restricts the user\u27s actions, including access to private data. In this paper, we seek to evaluate the effectiveness of multiple authenticators in promoting safer behavior in users. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through a user experiment --- we find that users make a distinction between the two authenticators and generally behave in a security-conscientious way, protecting their high authenticator a majority of the time. Our study suggests that TwoKind will be beneficial to several Internet applications, particularly if the privileges can be customized to a user\u27s security preferences