Crossing Boundaries: Patients’ Experiences of using a Diabetes eHealth System

This thesis is concerned with exploring patients’ experiences of using a diabetes eHealth system. The context of the study is the growth of interest in eHealth systems that focus on patient needs, alongside increasing home computer use and the rising incidence of chronic diseases, such as diabetes. I aim in this thesis to make a novel contribution to knowledge about how eHealth technology is experienced by patients with diabetes. The study takes the form of a qualitative enquiry into the use of a diabetes eHealth system by a group of patients and their healthcare practitioners at a primary care general practice in Northern England. Using symbolic interactionism as a methodological perspective and taking elements from grounded theory the study produces a theoretical framework based on a thematic analysis of participants’ descriptions of their experiences of using the eHealth system. A diabetes eHealth system was designed and built for the study, and 38 patients were recruited from a single GP practice using purposive sampling. Participants used the system for six months and were interviewed at the beginning, middle and end of the study period. Issues of surveillance, automation, endorsement and interaction influenced use and experiences of the system. Results from the study indicate that participants use and perceive the eHealth system as part of their diabetes management experience. My thesis is that the eHealth system is a boundary structure through which boundary objects, such as electronically formatted blood glucose readings, are created and shared across different social worlds. The eHealth system crosses the boundary between two spheres of an individual’s diabetes management experience, the personal sphere of self-management, and the external sphere of seeking and receiving support from medical experts and others with diabetes. The co-location of these two spheres exposes participants to scrutiny but also opens up new possibilities for collaboration and learning

Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice: The Agile Research Network

We report an action research-oriented approach to investigating agile project management methods which aims to bridge the gap between academic research and agile practice. We have set up a research network of academics from two universities, through which we run focussed project-based research into agile methods. Organisations are invited to suggest an ‘agile challenge’ and we work closely with them to investigate how challenge affects them. Our approach is both academic and practical. We use appropriate research methods such as interviews, observation and discussion to clarify and explore the nature of the challenge. We then undertake a detailed literature review to identify practical approaches that may be appropriate for adoption, and report our findings. If the organisation introduces new practices or approaches as a result of our work, we conduct an academic evaluation. Alternatively, if we uncover an under-researched area, we propose undertaking some basic research. As befits the topic, we work iteratively and incrementally and produce regular outputs. In this paper we introduce our approach, overview research methods used in the agile research literature, describe our research model, outline a case study, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of our approach. We discuss the importance of producing outputs that are accessible to practitioners as well as researchers. Findings suggest that by investigating the challenges that organisations propose, we uncover problems that are of real relevance to the agile community and obtain rich insights into the facilitators and barriers that organisations face when using agile methods. Additionally, we find that practitioners are interested in research results as long as publications are relevant to their needs and are written accessibly. We are satisfied with the basic structure of our approach, but we anticipate that the method will evolve as we continue to work with collaborators

Overcoming challenges in collaboration between research and practice: the agile research network

There is wide acceptance in the software engineering field that industry and research can gain significantly from each other and there have been several initiatives for encouraging collaboration between the two. However there are some often-quoted challenges in this kind of collaboration. For example, that the timescales of research and practice are incompatible, that research is not seen as relevant for practice, and that research demands a different kind of rigour than practice supports. These are complex challenges that are not always easy to overcome. For the last year we have been using an approach designed to address some of these challenges and to bridge the gap between research and practice, specifically in the agile software development arena. So far we have collaborated successfully with two partners and have investigated two practitioner-driven challenges with agile. In this short paper we will introduce the approach, how it addresses the collaboration challenges between research and practice, and describe the lessons learned from our experience

Bridging the gap between research and agile practice: an evolutionary model

There is wide acceptance in the software engineering field that industry and research can gain significantly from each other and there have been several initiatives to encourage collaboration between the two. However there are some often-quoted challenges in this kind of collaboration. For example, that the timescales of research and practice are incompatible, that research is not seen as relevant for practice, and that research demands a different kind of rigour than practice supports. These are complex challenges that are not always easy to overcome. Since the beginning of 2013 we have been using an approach designed to address some of these challenges and to bridge the gap between research and practice, specifically in the agile software development arena. So far we have collaborated successfully with three partners and have investigated three practitioner-driven challenges with agile. The model of collaboration that we adopted has evolved with the lessons learned in the first two collaborations and been modified for the third. In this paper we introduce the collaboration model, discuss how it addresses the collaboration challenges between research and practice and how it has evolved, and describe the lessons learned from our experience

Social and Communication Challenges for Agile Software Teams

Agile methods are being widely used in industry and government projects as a way of delivering IT software projects. We report results from a survey about agile team work and a follow-up interview study. Themes emerging from the interviews were team tension, method adaptation and cultural change. We discuss the implications of practitioners’ experiences and views, and highlight some of the social and ethical challenges for IT developers working in organisations that adopt agile methods. We take as the focus of our work, a view that cultural shifts are essential to agile working, and that these require an intensive commitment from individuals, teams and organisations

The Evolving Role of Antifungal Susceptibility Testing

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98278/1/phar1233.pd

Designing Teenage Emotions with a Life of Their Own

In this chapter, two participatory design activities are described in which teenagers create lo-fi designs describing emotions and explain the rationale for their design choices. Designs annotating and describing emotions are categorised as anthropomorphic, abstract, object based, or biomorphic. The chapter concludes: (i) teenagers use a variety of visual metaphors to describe emotions, (ii) teenagers use anthropomorphic visual metaphors most often to describe emotions and (iii) teenagers make more use of abstract and biomorphic visual metaphors to describe ‘negative’ emotions. The effect of materials on designs is analysed, suggesting that teenagers are more likely to create designs describing emotions featuring anthropomorphic visual metaphors when using malleable three-dimensional materials. Suggestions are made for the use of externalisation and personification as part of interactive emotion displays within affective systems. A focus group evaluation of a prototype mobile app is described, which suggests that teenagers place more importance on an affective systems ability to support social relationships than they do its ability to support psychological development. This research will be of value to interaction designers and Child-Computer Interaction researchers seeking to understand how teenagers use different visual metaphors to describe different emotions

Remote Working and Collaboration in Agile Teams

Agile software development relies heavily on tight and continuous collaboration, which becomes a challenge when team members work at a distance. Despite significant focus on distributed Agile working, remote working, when only one or two individuals are not co-located with the rest of the team, remains largely unexplored. We focus on one organisation with several such teams and investigate one in detail using distributed cognition – a theoretical framework for studying collaborative work. We present the results of a group retrospective, and a comparative analysis of collaboration in the team, taking the contrasting perspectives of the remote worker and his co-located teammates. The analysis shows substantial differences in three aspects: virtual artefacts; information flow; and the primacy of structure and facilities provided by collaborative platforms. Platforms that support meaningful collaboration and engagement for the remote worker, and create parity between all members of the team are crucial to integrating capability

Strategies for doing Agile in a non-Agile Environment

Background: Most companies practicing Agile are not fully Agile but instead they combine both Agile and traditional practices in their operations. It is not clear how these practices can be successfully used together in an organisation.Aims: We investigate practitioners' mitigation strategies related to the challenge of doing Agile in a non-Agile environment.Method: Strategies were collected during two studies, an online survey and an interactive workshop run at an Agile meetup and analysed thematically.Results: Strategies related to the wider organisation and not just software development. Two perspectives emerged from the data: an organisational and a change perspective. Five organisational themes were identified with Management and decision-making and Culture the two biggest themes. Nine change themes were identified, with Being open, Using specific approaches and Educating the biggest themes.Conclusions: Better understanding is needed of how Agile practitioners can accomplish bottom-up change in their organisation