Citizens’ Juries: When Older Adults Deliberate on the Benefits and Risks of Smart Health and Smart Homes

open access articleBackground: Technology-enabled healthcare or smart health has provided a wealth of products and services to enable older people to monitor and manage their own health conditions at home, thereby maintaining independence, whilst also reducing healthcare costs. However, despite the growing ubiquity of smart health, innovations are often technically driven, and the older user does not often have input into design. The purpose of the current study was to facilitate a debate about the positive and negative perceptions and attitudes towards digital health technologies. Methods: We conducted citizens’ juries to enable a deliberative inquiry into the benefits and risks of smart health technologies and systems. Transcriptions of group discussions were interpreted from a perspective of life-worlds versus systems-worlds. Results: Twenty-three participants of diverse demographics contributed to the debate. Views of older people were felt to be frequently ignored by organisations implementing systems and technologies. Participants demonstrated diverse levels of digital literacy and a range of concerns about misuse of technology. Conclusion: Our interpretation contrasted the life-world of experiences, hopes, and fears with the systems-world of surveillance, e ciencies, and risks. This interpretation o ers new perspectives on involving older people in co-design and governance of smart health and smart homes

A comparison of presentation methods for conducting youth juries

The 5Rights Youth Juries are an educational intervention to promote digital literacy by engaging participants (i.e. jurors) in a deliberative discussion around their digital rights. The main objective of these jury-styled focus groups is to encourage children and young people to identify online concerns and solutions with a view to developing recommendations for government policy-makers and industry chiefs. The methodology included a series of dramatized scenarios that encourage jurors to deliberate about their digital rights. This paper compares two formats for these scenarios: live actors and professionally recorded and edited videos of the same actors. Results failed to show any major differences between formats indicating the cost-effectiveness of the video-recorded format and the possibility for others to run the 5Rights Youth Juries with the support of an online open educational resource

The digital workplace and its dark side: An integrative review

An intensification of digital working driven by Covid-19 has brought into sharp focus both the beneficial nature of digital workplace technologies and their potential dark side. Research has burgeoned in this area in recent years, but an integrated view across fields, technologies, dark side effects and outcomes is lacking. There are potential insights to be gained from compiling and comparing results and theoretical approaches. Following integrative review procedures, 194 studies were analysed to understand unintended negative consequences of a range of workplace technologies across disciplines and methodologies. The results demonstrate that considerable insight has been uncovered regarding certain dark side effects, stress in particular, in relation to e-mail and smartphones. However, a broader view of how they might manifest in relation to employees’ holistic digital experience of work beyond certain information and communication technologies (ICTs) is lacking, including a clear picture of objective demands of the technology with which these effects are associated. Much remains to be understood across the full range of dark side effects in relation to the digital workplace including the associations between them and how they relate to cognitive and affective outcomes. The importance of both theoretical rigour and diversity is highlighted

“I Don’t Feel Like There’s Enough Awareness about the Damage That Social Media Does”: A Thematic Analysis of the Relationships between Social Media Use, Mental Wellbeing, and Care Experience

Social media (SM) has become an unavoidable mode of communication for many young people today, leading to increasing importance in exploring its impact on mental wellbeing. This includes exploring the impact on those who may be more susceptible to developing mental health issues due to adverse childhood experiences, such as care-experienced young people. This study consisted of 22 semi-structured interviews with young people from the general population (n = 11) and care-experienced young people (n = 11). Thematic analysis revealed varying effects of SM, including positive effects such as entertainment, inspiration, and belongingness. However, other findings indicated that the design of SM is damaging for young people’s wellbeing. Age and developmental maturity appeared as key factors influencing the impact of SM on wellbeing, with the indication of further protective factors such as self-awareness, education, and certain SM design features. Specifically, care-experienced young people expressed how lived experiences of the care system can have both positive and negative effects on SM use while revealing the complex relationship between care experience, SM use, and wellbeing. These results can be used to inform SM design and policy and to provide suggestions for SM and wellbeing education among the general population and care-experienced young people

An exploration of how trust online relates to psychological and subjective wellbeing

Internet users often report feelings of stress, anxiety, and a lack of control, often related to uncertainty about the use of algorithms and autonomous systems (AS) behind what they encounter. This may lead to a loss of trust in the services, content, and websites people encounter online. In order to ensure that the online world contributes to human flourishing, it is important to understand how both trust and wellbeing manifest online. This paper describes an online questionnaire exploring the relationships between factors related to trust and psychological and subjective wellbeing, as well as online activity and digital confidence. Results suggest that trust is important to people online but in practice is quite low, and that positive measures of wellbeing outweigh the negative, but more could be done to design AS in a responsible, trustworthy, and wellbeing-affirming manner, particularly considering ways to enhance human autonomy and competence. Suggestions are made for how designers might consider trust and wellbeing when approaching the creation and presentation of online AS

Towards understanding how individuals with inflammatory bowel disease use contemporary social media platforms for health-related discourse

© 2020 With a growing prevalence of social media use worldwide where individuals share varying aspects of their lives, this paper focuses on how individuals with a chronic illness use these communications platforms to discuss their health. This paper aims to provide a qualitative approach to understanding the connection between the technical features offered by Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and the therapeutic affordances experienced. Semi structured interviews were carried out with 38 participants living with Inflammatory Bowel Disease who use Facebook, Twitter and/or Instagram for health-related support. Interview transcripts were analysed systematically to draw connections between platform features and therapeutic affordances. The interview data was thematically coded through an adapted SCENA Model to infer therapeutic affordances, while content analysis identified the technical features discussed. Our findings indicate that most participants (79%) use more than one social media platform for health-related discourse and that features on the platforms offer different therapeutic affordances. Facebook Groups’ privacy settings affording self-presentation as individuals feel comforted that other people cannot see what they post, while hashtags afford connectivity on Twitter and Instagram, but not on Facebook. This approach enabled the authors to identify similarities and differences between social media platforms and their technical features

Health Expectations Front Cover: Volume 25 Issue 4

The cover image is based on the Research Article What's Up With Everyone?: A qualitative study on young people's perceptions of co-created online animations to promote mental health literacy by Sachiyo Ito-Jaeger et al.