Evaluating hospital websites in Kuwait to improve consumer engagement and access to health information:a cross-sectional analytical study

Abstract Background Current advances in information and communication technology have made accessing and obtaining health-related information easier than ever before. Today, many hospital websites use a patient-centric approach to promote engagement and encourage learning for better health-related decision making. However, little is known about the current state of hospital websites in the State of Kuwait. This study aims to evaluate hospital websites in Kuwait and offer recommendations to improve patient engagement and access to health information. Methods This study employs a cross-sectional analytical approach to evaluate hospital websites in Kuwait in 2017. The websites of hospitals that provide in-patient services were identified through a structured search. Only active websites that were available in either English or Arabic were considered. The evaluation of the websites involved a combination of automated and expert- based evaluation methods and was performed across four dimensions: Accessibility, Usability, Presence, and Content. Results Nine hospitals met the inclusion criteria. Most of the websites fell short in all four dimensions. None of the websites passed the accessibility guidelines. The usability of websites varied between hospitals. Overall, the majority of hospitals in Kuwait have rudimentary online presence and their websites require careful reassessment with respect to design, content, and user experience. The websites focus primarily on promoting services provided by the hospital rather than engaging and communicating with patients or providing evidence-based information. Conclusions Healthcare organization and website developers should follow best-practices to improve their websites taking into consideration the quality, readability, objectivity, coverage and currency of the information as well as the design of their websites. Hospitals should leverage social media to gain outreach and better engagement with consumers. The websites should be offered in additional languages commonly spoken by people living in Kuwait. Efforts should be made to ensure that health information on hospital websites are evidence-based and checked by healthcare professionals

Facilitating the authoring of multimedia social problem solving skills instructional modules

Difficulties in social skills are generally considered defining characteristics of High-Functioning Autism (HFA). These difficulties interfere with the educational experiences and quality of life of individuals with HFA, and interventions must be highly individualized to be effective. I explore ways technologies may play a role in assisting individuals with the acquisition of social problem solving skills. This thesis presents the design, development, and evaluation of two systems; Refl-ex, which is a collection of multimedia instructional modules designed to enable adolescents with HFA to practice social problem solving skills, and REACT, a system to facilitate the authoring of a wider variety of instructional modules. The authoring tool is designed to help parents, teachers, and other stakeholders to create Refl-ex-like instructional modules. The approach uses models of social knowledge created using crowdsourcing techniques to provide the authors with support throughout the authoring process. A series of studies were conducted to inform the design of high-fidelity prototypes of each of the systems and to evaluate the prototypes. The contributions of this thesis are: 1) the creation of obstacle-based branching, an approach to developing interactive social skills instructional modules that has been evaluated by experts to be an improvement to current practices; 2) the development of an approach to building models of social knowledge that can be dynamically created and expanded using crowdsourcing; and 3) the development a system that gives parents and other caregivers the ability to easily create customized social skills instructional modules for their children and students.PhDCommittee Chair: Abowd, Gregory; Committee Chair: Arriaga, Rosa; Committee Member: Magerko, Brian; Committee Member: Riedl, Mark; Committee Member: Tartaro, Andre

Towards a framework to situate assistive technology design in the context of culture

We present the findings from a cross-cultural study of the expectations and perceptions of individuals with autism and other intellectual disabilities (AOID) in Kuwait, Pakistan, South Korea, and the United States. Our findings exposed cultural nuances that have implications for the design of assistive technologies. We develop a framework, based on three themes; 1) lifestyles; 2) socio-technical infrastructure; and 3) monetary and intellectual resources within which the cultural implications and opportunities for assistive technology were explored. The three key contributions of this work are: 1) the development of a framework that outlines how culture impacts perceptions and expectations of individuals with intellectual disabilities; 2) a mapping of how this framework leads to implications and opportunities for assistive technology design; 3) the presentation of concrete examples of how these implications impact the design of three emerging assistive technologies