Overcoming Challenges to Inclusive User-based Testing of Health Information Technology with Vulnerable Older Adults: Recommendations from a Human Factors Engineering Expert Inquiry

Objectives: Involving representative users in usability testing of health information technology (HIT) is central to user-centered design. However, (vulnerable) older adults as representative users have unique requirements. Aging processes may affect physical capabilities and cognitive skills, which can hamper testing with this demographic and may require special attention and revised protocols. This study was performed to provide expert-based recommendations for HIT user-testing with (vulnerable) older adults to support inclusive HIT design and evaluation. Methods: First, we conducted a structured workshop with ten experts in HIT implementation and research, recruited through purposeful sampling, to generate insights into how characteristics of older adults may influence user-testing. Next, five Human Factor researchers experienced in HIT user-testing with (vulnerable) older adults validated the results and provided additional textual insights to gain consensus on the most important recommendations. A thematic analysis was performed on the resulting inquiries. Applied codes were based on the User-Centered Design framework. Results: The analysis resulted in nine recommendations for user-testing of HIT with older adults, divided into three main themes: (1) empathetic approach and trust-building, (2) new requirements for testing and study design, and (3) adjustments to usability evaluation methods. For each theme a checklist of relevant items to follow-up on the recommendation is provided. Conclusions: The recommendations generated through expert inquiry contribute to more effective usability testing of HIT with older adults. This provides an important step towards improved accessibility of HIT amongst older adults through inclusive user-centered design

Advancement in heterogeneous base catalyzed technology: An efficient production of biodiesel fuels

Price fluctuation of petroleum-based diesel, climate change, emerging mandate obligations, availability of new feedstock and the upgrading of conversion technologies are expected to drive biodiesel market to grow robustly in the next coming 10 years. However, the current bottleneck in biodiesel production is the lack of economical sustainable conversion technologies. Generally, industrial production of biodiesel is greatly relied on alkaline homogeneous transesterification reaction. Limitation of the technology, such as multistep process which incur extra pre-step for high acid oil treatment and post-step for biodiesel purification and alkali washing as diminished the economic feasibility and low environmental impact of the entire biodiesel process. Heterogeneous catalysis offers immense potential to develop simple transesterification process, including one step reaction, easy separation, reusability of catalyst, and green reaction. Thus, the aim of this paper is to review the biodiesel production technologies such as blending, micro-emulsion, pyrolysis, and transesterification. Furthermore, recent studies on heterogeneous catalyzed transesterification were presented by discussing the issues such as catalytic performance on different types of biodiesel feedstock, transesterification reaction conditions, limitations encountered by heterogeneous catalysts, and reusability of solid catalysts. The heterogeneous catalysts presented in this review is mainly focused on solid base catalysts, which include single metal oxides, supported metal oxide, binary metal oxide, hydrotalcite, and natural waste shell-based catalyst. Furthermore, current perspectives on application of heterogeneous catalyzed technology in biodiesel industry were discussed herein. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC