Service innovation for living well with type 1 Diabetes

The UK’s NHS must evolve to embrace the co-production of health outcomes and patient-centred care to shift from the reductive treatment of illness to a holistic promotion of wellness. We are developing a methodology for service innovation building on this. Designing innovative services for young people with type 1 diabetes surfaced different views of wellness from health professionals, young people and their parents. Our challenge has been to value each perspective in what we have designed. Deploying artefacts enabled constructive dialogue with our participants, so how might interactive artefacts challenge views of wellness

Different views : including others in participatory health service innovation

We describe our experiences employing experience-based design (EBD) to improve an outpatients health service in the UK and discuss the impacts of incorporating the voices of those not directly using or working within the service. We suggest that such new perspectives, experiences and expertise may enable the development of service innovations outside patients’ and staffs’ conceptual space of problems/solutions, but can affect the ownership and agency within the change project. To conclude, we propose a balance between accomplishing change and creating the self-belief to achieve it

The Problem Of The Fictive Stance

Briefly sketched, I argue for four interrelated claims: (a) Works of fiction can be based upon non-fictional content and can therefore relate directly to the world and portray truth even when the author explicitly intends to portray the content as fiction. (b) The nature of truth is such that an event is true or not irrespective of the content it is expressed or engaged in. Thus if something is true this is so regardless of whether the author intended it, or whether the reader encounters it, fictively or not. (c) The truth-value of claims encountered in fiction can be, and often is, relevant to interpretation of that fiction qua fiction. (Two observations are relevant here: (i) Most authors of fiction intend to make truth claims in their works to be recognised as true by their readers. (ii) Truth claims encountered in fiction can be relevant for the development of the fictive story line and fictive characters encountered.) (d) By mixing fiction and truth, the authors demand that the reader adopt multiple stances and therefore the idea that the reader must decide whether to read a piece of literature as fiction or truth, is implausible

Clustering time series data by analysing graphical models of connectivity and the application to diagnosis of brain disorders

In this thesis we investigate clustering and classification techniques applied to time series data from multivariate stochastic processes. In particular we focus on extracting features in the form of graphical models of conditional dependence between the process components. The motivation is to use the techniques on brain EEG data measured from multiple patients and investigate whether it can be used in areas such as medical diagnosis. We look at both the case where the graphical model is estimated based on time series recorded on the scalp and also where the graphical model is estimated based on source signals within the brain. In the first case we use a multiple hypothesis testing approach to build the graphical models and a learning algorithm based on random forests to find patterns within multiple graphical models. In the second case we use independent component analysis (ICA) to extract the source time series and estimate the conditional dependence graphs using partial mutual information. It is of particular note that in this case due to the indeterminacy issues associated with ICA we only know the conditional dependence graphs up to some unknown permutation of the nodes. To solve this issue we use novel methods based on an extension of graph matching to multiple inputs in order to develop a new clustering algorithm. Finally, we show how this algorithm can be combined with further information obtained during the ICA phase contained in columns of the unmixing matrix, to create a more powerful method.Open Acces

Participatory healthcare service design and innovation

This paper describes the use of Experience Based Design (EBD), a participatory methodology for healthcare service design, to improve the outpatient service for older people at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals. The challenges in moving from stories to designing improvements, co-designing for wicked problems, and the effects of participants' limited scopes of action are discussed. It concludes by proposing that such problems are common to participatory service design in large institutions and recommends that future versions of EBD incorporate more tools to promote divergent thinking