Feel My Pain: Design and Evaluation of Painpad, a Tangible Device for Supporting Inpatient Self-Logging of Pain

Monitoring patients' pain is a critical issue for clinical caregivers, particularly among staff responsible for providing analgesic relief. However, collecting regularly scheduled pain readings from patients can be difficult and time-consuming for clinicians. In this paper we present Painpad, a tangible device that was developed to allow patients to engage in self-logging of their pain. We report findings from two hospital-based field studies in which Painpad was deployed to a total of 78 inpatients recovering from ambulatory surgery. We find that Painpad results in improved frequency and compliance with pain logging, and that self-logged scores may be more faithful to patients' experienced pain than corresponding scores reported to nurses. We also show that older adults may prefer tangible interfaces over tablet-based alternatives for reporting their pain, and we contribute design lessons for pain logging devices intended for use in hospital settings

Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare and Social Services: Optimizing Resources and Promoting Sustainability

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) provides the ability to interpret massive amounts of data, which many industries are already taking advantage of. This contribution aims to investigate the potential applications of A.I. in healthcare in order to understand how it can help optimize resources in a sector that risks becoming unsustainable due to high costs and lengthy care processes. Because A.I. development is constantly evolving, the authors examined the relevant literature, focusing on the last decade to highlight the significant advances made during this time period. A scheme of uses based on the care phases is presented as a result of the analysis. This scheme, which is made up of 4 + 1 categories, can help frame and analyze potential uses. Before the conclusion, the last section of the contribution addresses the remaining challenges and discovers that there are at least three types of open issues that must be resolved before A.I. can be effectively used in healthcare, as well as other sectors. A.I may revolutionize the delivery of healthcare services, but this process must be guided because the technology does not appear to be sufficiently mature and solutions to several problems must be found

Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare and Social Services: Optimizing Resources and Promoting Sustainability

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) provides the ability to interpret massive amounts of data, which many industries are already taking advantage of. This contribution aims to investigate the potential applications of A.I. in healthcare in order to understand how it can help optimize resources in a sector that risks becoming unsustainable due to high costs and lengthy care processes. Because A.I. development is constantly evolving, the authors examined the relevant literature, focusing on the last decade to highlight the significant advances made during this time period. A scheme of uses based on the care phases is presented as a result of the analysis. This scheme, which is made up of 4 + 1 categories, can help frame and analyze potential uses. Before the conclusion, the last section of the contribution addresses the remaining challenges and discovers that there are at least three types of open issues that must be resolved before A.I. can be effectively used in healthcare, as well as other sectors. A.I may revolutionize the delivery of healthcare services, but this process must be guided because the technology does not appear to be sufficiently mature and solutions to several problems must be found

Alexa, How Do I Feel Today? Smart Speakers for Healthcare and Wellbeing: an Analysis About Uses and Challenges

One of the artificial intelligence applications with an increasing popularity is related to conversational agents. Indeed, the virtual assistants are conversational agents capable of handling a spoken dialogue with people providing information and various types of services. How can virtual assistants and smart speakers be used for healthcare purposes? The virtual assistant, understood as digital services designed to simulate human conversation and provide personalized responses based on input from the users, currently can be effectively exploited to realize self-care solutions for the people, who can use them to seek information, contact doctors, monitor their health parameters and adherence to therapies; but also, as a hands-free support for practitioners to optimize workflows in hospitals or small clinics. They can be used also to provide useful information for innovative health programs at large scale patient-centered. This contribution contains an analysis about the use of virtual assistants in healthcare, conducted through the exploration of scientific studies and research dealing with the topic concerning the use of conversational agents in healthcare. The analysis aims at systematizing current functionalities, through a new cataloging scheme based on contexts of use and end users. The increasing use of virtual assistants in healthcare can impact society thanks to its strengths. At the same time, a number of critical points have emerged and still exist which provide ground for further challenges need to be addressed to ensure that the associated risks are reduced

The LUA Toolbar

In this paper we describe a new toolbar for the validation of website accessibility. This issue concerns the right of all citizens to obtain and maintain access to a society-wide pool of information resources and interpersonal communication facilities. At first we speak about the needs of impaired users for a profitable Web navigation. In the second section the focus is on the Italian “Stanca Act”, which defines the primary environment of the project; then we explain the toolbar most valued features: the ease of use of its interface and the precision of responses gathered. Finally we show our interface prototype with its major options and, in the last section, we picture the further development

Designing and Testing HomeCare4All: A eHealth Mobile App for Elderly

Aging population implies an increase in demand for health care services. This hopefully could be solved by e-health, even if some issues arise about technology acceptance and adoption among the elderly. In this article, the authors illustrate HomeCare4All project as a case study to apply Human Centered Design (HCD) process in the field of digital health services, aiming at design trustworthy mobile applications for elderly people to book healthcare services at home. Starting from the results achieved from the early step of design, this paper describes the following steps of the creation of a design solution by identifying use cases, defining information architecture and prototyping an app mockup. The prototypes are then evaluated through a double usability test sessions with users, implementing an iterative design process. In conclusion authors advance suggestions for designing trustworthy mobile interactions for elderly people or people unaccustomed to technology, showing the importance of involving end users in the various stages of the design process

Rethinking Public Transport Services for the Elderly Through a Transgenerational Design Approach

In discussing the city suitability to people’s needs, generally a special attention has been given to people with special needs, e.g. the elderly. In this sense, most of the research about accessible cities has focused on the architectural design of public spaces, aiming at ensuring the access to urban places through the removal of architectural barriers. However, as technologies have been diffusing in many different city services, it also should be given attention to the constraints derived from this unavoidable change affecting the elderly life. The focus is on the potential of the technologies for improving the elderly city experience. In this paper the authors, starting from the principles of the transgenerational design, focus on how the technologies applied to the public transportation services could improve citizen experience and promote really inclusive mobility services

Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)

In 2008, we published the first set of guidelines for standardizing research in autophagy. Since then, this topic has received increasing attention, and many scientists have entered the field. Our knowledge base and relevant new technologies have also been expanding. Thus, it is important to formulate on a regular basis updated guidelines for monitoring autophagy in different organisms. Despite numerous reviews, there continues to be confusion regarding acceptable methods to evaluate autophagy, especially in multicellular eukaryotes. Here, we present a set of guidelines for investigators to select and interpret methods to examine autophagy and related processes, and for reviewers to provide realistic and reasonable critiques of reports that are focused on these processes. These guidelines are not meant to be a dogmatic set of rules, because the appropriateness of any assay largely depends on the question being asked and the system being used. Moreover, no individual assay is perfect for every situation, calling for the use of multiple techniques to properly monitor autophagy in each experimental setting. Finally, several core components of the autophagy machinery have been implicated in distinct autophagic processes (canonical and noncanonical autophagy), implying that genetic approaches to block autophagy should rely on targeting two or more autophagy-related genes that ideally participate in distinct steps of the pathway. Along similar lines, because multiple proteins involved in autophagy also regulate other cellular pathways including apoptosis, not all of them can be used as a specific marker for bona fide autophagic responses. Here, we critically discuss current methods of assessing autophagy and the information they can, or cannot, provide. Our ultimate goal is to encourage intellectual and technical innovation in the field