The role of gaming during difficult life experiences

HCI has become increasingly interested in the use of technology during difficult life experiences. Yet despite considerable popularity, little is known about how and why people engage with games in times of personal difficulty. Based on a qualitative analysis of an online survey (N=95), our findings indicate that games offered players much needed respite from stress, supported them in dealing with their feelings, facilitated social connections, stimulated personal change and growth, and provided a lifeline in times of existential doubt. However, despite an emphasis on gaming as being able to support coping in ways other activities did not, participants also referred to games as unproductive and as an obstacle to living well. We discuss these findings in relation to both coping process and outcome, while considering tensions around the potential benefits and perceived value of gaming

Motivations, Learning and Creativity in Online Citizen Sceince Charlene Jennett, Laure Kloetzer, Daniel Schneider, Ioanna Iacovides, Anna L. Cox, Margaret Gold, Brian Fuchs, Alexandra Eveleigh, Kathleen Mathieu, Zoya Ajani and Yasmin Talsi

Online citizen science projects have demonstrated their usefulness for research, however little is known about the potential benefits for volunteers. We conducted 39 interviews (28 volunteers, 11 researchers) to gain a greater understanding of volunteers' motivations, learning and creativity (MLC). In our MLC model we explain that participating and progressing in a project community provides volunteers with many indirect opportunities for learning and creativity. The more aspects that volunteers are involved in, the more likely they are to sustain their participation in the project. These results have implications for the design and management of online citizen science projects. It is important to provide users with tools to communicate in order to supporting social learning, community building and sharing.This article is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial - NoDerivativeWorks 4.0 License. The article attached is the publisher's pdf

Exploring Citizen Psych-Science and the Motivations of Errordiary Volunteers

Although virtual citizen science projects have the potential to engage large networks of people in science research, seeding and maintaining such networks can be difficult. A feature of successful projects is that they have well-motivated volunteers. What makes volunteers motivated rather than apathetic? In this paper we focus on projects that contribute to psychology research, which we term ‘citizen psych-science’. This differs from typical citizen science because volunteers are asked to contribute themselves as data. We describe research studies that we conducted with Errordiary – a citizen psych-science project where volunteers tweet about their everyday experiences of human error. These studies were: (1) an interview study, to explore the motivations of eight Errordiary volunteers; and (2) three focus groups, to explore the potential of attracting new communities to Errordiary. We found that the personal nature of the data can influence participation in positive and negative ways. We suggest several factors that scientists need to consider when encouraging citizen psych-science volunteers to contribute their personal experiences towards research

MOODs: Building massive open online diaries for researchers, teachers and contributors

Internet-based research conducted in partnership with paid crowdworkers and volunteer citizen scientists is an increasingly common method for collecting data from large, diverse populations. We wanted to leverage web-based citizen science to gain insights into phenomena that are part of people's everyday lives. To do this, we developed the concept of a Massive Open Online Diary (MOOD). A MOOD is a tool for capturing, storing and presenting short updates from multiple contributors on a particular topic. These updates are aggregated into public corpora that can be viewed, analysed and shared. MOODs offer a novel method for crowdsourcing diary-like data in a way that provides value for researchers, teachers and contributors. MOODs also come with unique community-building and ethical challenges. We describe the benefits and challenges of MOODs in relation to Errordiary.org, a MOOD we created to aid our exploration of human error

Closing the Virtuous Circle: Making the Nuances of Infusion Pump Use Visible

Infusion pumps are sophisticated, safety critical devices that are used by people with a range of skills and backgrounds. Errors with various degrees of severity have been reported in their use, e.g. (ISMP, 2007), and they have been implicated in many medication errors (e.g. Husch et al, 2005). These incidents are typically not due to device failures, but to pumps being used in ways that were not anticipated by their developers. An example would be the avoidance of, or need to work around, Dose Error Reduction Systems (DERS) on IV infusion pumps. Such systems are designed to protect patients and users by limiting the potential for inadvertent, incorrect programing (Sims et al, 2010), but may not take into account specifics regarding the context in which they are being used (AAMI/FDA, 2010). One of the challenges in developing infusion pumps that are fit for purpose is that they are used pervasively across many branches of healthcare for delivery of various treatments to people with many different conditions (Iacovides, Cox & Blandford, 2013). If intravenous medication and other procedures involving infusion devices are to become safer then there needs to be convergence between the ways they are intended to be used and the ways they are actually used in practice. This is a concern for all involved in the development, regulation, procurement, training and use of infusion devices. Many factors influence the design of next-generation devices, including regulation and standards, and procurement policies and practices. In turn, the design of devices, local policies about use and the ways in which staff are trained influence performance. In principle, there should be a virtuous circle in which an understanding of actual use informs future regulation, procurement, design, policy, etc. However, this can be difficult to achieve in practice. Real performance is currently often invisible, and reports where actual use deviates from intended use tend to be dismissed as anecdotes, deviant behavior, “off-label use”, violations, etc. Post-market surveillance typically focuses on reported incidents and major problems. It is difficult for a rich understanding of real performance to feed back and influence regulation and procurement. Without a complete loop in which understanding of actual use feeds into design, we end up with pumps that are not fit for purpose and whose safety is therefore compromised. The potential for a virtuous circle is missed because the feedback loop is broken. The aim of this paper is to “make visible”, and give a voice to, some of the less prominent, but nevertheless important, activities that exemplify real practices that result from the design, policy and training decisions that precede them. We do this by summarizing issues that we have identified across a number of studies of infusion pump use and training and, where possible, the factors that shape behaviours. Our paper includes examples from both published papers and work-in-progress, that describe nurse training, critical care, oncology, hematology, emergency room, surgery and medication administration record design (e.g., Rajkomar & Blandford, 2012; Furniss, Blandford & Mayer, 2011; Back & Cox, 2013). These examples of real practice cover only a small part of the space of all practices. But by “making visible” these practices, we move a step closer to being able to reason about implications for design, not just for devices but also for surrounding systems (prescribing, training, procurement, regulation, etc.), as well as implications for use (e.g. standardizing best practice within particular contexts). References: AAMI/FDA. (2010). Infusing Patients Safely: Priority Issues from the AAMI/FDA Infusion Device Summit. Retrieved 5/10/13, 2012, from http://tinyurl.com/46l7ynq Back, J. & Cox, A.L. (2013) Artifacts for programmable devices: the good, the bad and the ugly. Proceedings of the 2013 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1731-1736. Furniss, D., Blandford, A., & Mayer, A. (2011). Unremarkable errors: Low-level disturbances in infusion pump use. Proceedings of the 25th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction (HCI-2011), 197–204. Husch, M., Sullivan, C., Rooney, D., Barnard, C., Fotis, M., Clarke, J., & Noskin, G. (2005). Insights from the sharp end of intravenous medication errors: implications for infusion pump technology. Quality and Safety in Health Care, 14(2), 80-86. Iacovides, I., Cox, A. L., & Blandford, A. (2013). Supporting learning within the workplace: device training in healthcare. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 31st European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics. ISMP. (2007). Fluorouracil incident root cause analysis. Retrieved 10/5/13, 2012, from http://www.ismp-canada.org/download/reports/FluorouracilIncidentMay2007.pdf Rajkomar, A., & Blandford, A. (2012). Understanding infusion administration in the ICU through Distributed Cognition. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 45, 580–590. Sims, N., Kinnealey, M. E., Hampton, R., Fishman, G. and DeMonaco, H. (2010) Drug Infusion Pumps in Anesthesia, Critical Care, and Pain Management. In Sandberg, W., Urman, R., & Ehrenfeld, J. (2010). The MGH Textbook of Anesthetic Equipment: Expert Consult. Churchill Livingstone. pp 236-24

10 simple rules to create a serious game, illustrated with examples from structural biology

Serious scientific games are games whose purpose is not only fun. In the field of science, the serious goals include crucial activities for scientists: outreach, teaching and research. The number of serious games is increasing rapidly, in particular citizen science games, games that allow people to produce and/or analyze scientific data. Interestingly, it is possible to build a set of rules providing a guideline to create or improve serious games. We present arguments gathered from our own experience ( Phylo , DocMolecules , HiRE-RNA contest and Pangu) as well as examples from the growing literature on scientific serious games

Revisiting the Dexamethasone Suppression Test in unipolar major depression: an exploratory study

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Reliability and cultural applicability of the Greek version of the International Personality Disorders Examination.

BACKGROUND: The International Personality Disorders Examination (IPDE) constitutes the proposal of the WHO for the reliable diagnosis of personality disorders (PD). The IPDE assesses pathological personality and is compatible both with DSM-IV and ICD-10 diagnosis. However it is important to test the reliability and cultural applicability of different IPDE translations. METHODS: Thirty-one patients (12 male and 19 female) aged 35.25 ± 11.08 years, took part in the study. Three examiners applied the interview (23 interviews of two and 8 interviews of 3 examiners, that is 47 pairs of interviews and 70 single interviews). The phi coefficient was used to test categorical diagnosis agreement and the Pearson Product Moment correlation coefficient to test agreement concerning the number of criteria met. RESULTS: Translation and back-translation did not reveal specific problems. Results suggested that reliability of the Greek translation is good. However, socio-cultural factors (family coherence, work environment etc) could affect the application of some of the IPDE items in Greece. The diagnosis of any PD was highly reliable with phi >0.92. However, diagnosis of non-specfic PD was not reliable at all (phi close to 0) suggesting that this is a true residual category. Dianosis of specific PDs were highly reliable with the exception of schizoid PD. Diagnosis of antisocial and Borderline PDs were perfectly reliable with phi equal to 1.00. CONCLUSIONS: The Greek translation of the IPDE is a reliable instrument for the assessment of personality disorder but cultural variation may limit its applicability in international comparisons