Category: Summer school

DOME · eHealth · Haptics · Medical applications · Medical Records Online · National patient survey · Summer school

Today I celebrate my blog’s first anniversary!

Jonas MollLeave a comment

Ren1

Exactly one year ago I wrote my very first blog post! You can read that short post here. From the beginning my intention was to write two posts a week, but for different reasons my average during this first year is 1.4/week. During this first year the blog has had 2782 views by 1466 visitors. During the first couple of months the number of views were under 100, but I’m glad to see that the numbers have kept increasing – the number of views in September was 491, and 53 views have been accumulated during the first days of October this year.

Since this is a special blog post, the picture I chose is not by any means related to my work. Instead, I chose one of the pictures I took while hiking in northern Sweden (Abisko) about two years ago – I just love the nature up there!

As a kind of celebration, I will here present a top 5 list with the five most read posts:

  1. My colleague, Thomas Lind, successfully defended his thesis today!

This is one of my latest posts, which I uploaded in the middle of September. Despite the short time frame this is, by far, the most read post! The post is about the defense resulting in my colleague, Thomas Lind, getting a Ph.D. degree.

  1. EHealth summer school in Dublin, day 5

Those who have followed my blog during the latest months know that I have been writing quite extensively about a summer school I attended – one week in Dublin and one week in Stockholm. I’m very happy to see that one of those posts is on this list, because it took quite a lot of time to write them. This particular post is also a kind of summary post which includes links to the other posts about the week in Dublin. The summer school was a nice experience in so many ways and I really encourage you to read those posts if you are interested in eHealth/mHealth design (the Stockholm posts, although not on the top 5 lists, can be found here).

  1. A very successful session about patient accessible electronic health records at Vitalis 2017!

This post is not only on the top 5 list regarding views, but it is, by far, the most shared post on social media. The post summarizes an 1.5 hours session hosted by the DOME consortium at Vitalis last spring. I really hope we will get the opportunity to do something similar at Vitalis 2018! Read this post if you want to know about the state of art regarding patient accessible electronic health records in Sweden.

  1. The team behind a new large patient survey on electronic health records in Sweden!

I’m also happy to see this one on the list – since this post represents one of the big studies I’m currently leading. This particular study is based on a large national survey focusing on patients’ experiences with and attitudes towards the patient accessible electronic health system Journalen. In this post I introduce all researchers that work with the study.

  1. Haptic feedback in medical applications

The fifth most read post belongs to the blog series on haptic feedback as an interaction modality, which I started last autumn. This particular one concerns how haptic feedback can be utilized in medical applications. In this post I also introduce my own work within this area, which I carried out as a Ph.D. student at KTH.

So, these were my five most read posts, and I’m glad to see that they relate to different areas. The only area not covered in this list is pedagogical development. This might change during the next year, however, since I will most probably get an extensive study on Twitter as a communication medium in higher education courses published and I will also write a series of posts about a basic course in human-computer interaction which I will be responsible for at Uppsala University (starting October 30).

I have really enjoyed the blogging activity and will definitely continue to update this blog regularly, so stay tuned for more!  🙂

eHealth · Summer school

EHealth summer school participants are staying in touch!

Jonas Moll1 Comment

About a week has gone by since the ACM SIGCHI/EIT Health summer school in Dublin and Stockholm/Uppsala ended. The eHealth summer school really gave a great learning experience and an opportunity to meet many researchers from similar fields. I miss both the full days of varying activities and the other participants, of course. But as I wrote in my latest blog post about the last day of the summer school, some of the participating Ph.D. students started a new community, which includes all participants and organizers.

The main communication channel for the new eHealth community is Slack and I’m very happy to see that there is already a lot of communication going on there, involving several participants! There are e.g. several hints about important conferences in fields related to eHealth and mHealth, reactions to a published journal and pictures from the summer school. Several of the participants, and the organizers, are also active on Twitter and interact quite a lot with each other’s tweets. Taking part in this ongoing communication among the participants leads me to believe that we will stay in touch for a long time ahead.

As a matter of fact, one of the summer school participants from Italy, Leysan Nurgalieva, will come to Uppsala University and work in our HTO research group for a few months, beginning later this autumn! Christiane Grünloh (who stay in Uppsala this entire week), Åsa Cajander and I spent Monday afternoon with Leysan discussing our respective research interests and possible collaborations. I’m excited about this, but will not write more about it here, since I know that there will be another blog post about Leysan’s visit showing up on our HTO blog soon.

I ended my last blog post stating that it would probably not be the last blog post I would write related to the summer school participants, and it clearly wasn’t! Now I’m positive there will be many more.

eHealth · Summer school

EHealth summer school in Stockholm, day 5!

Jonas Moll4 Comments

Sadly enough, this was the last day of the two very rewarding EIT Health/ACM SIGCHI eHealth summer school weeks in Dublin and Stockholm/Uppsala respectively. This day included project presentations (of course) as well as lectures on the importance of movement and on VR solutions for phobic treatment. You can follow these links to reach my posts about the other days in Stockholm and the one in Uppsala:

  1. Day 1 (Intro, action research,…)
  2. Day 2 (Patient accessible electronic health records,…)
  3. Day 3 (Game demoes and workshop,…)
  4. Day 4 (Soma design, sustainable development,…)

You can also find the post about the last day in Dublin (as well as links to posts about the other days in Dublin) here.

This day started off with yet another one of my former colleagues from KTH, Helena Tobiasson. She discussed the importance of movement especially in relation to work. The lecture started out with a very interesting exercise, in which pairs of participants should try to illustrate different movements we make during work or our study time. We were not allowed to talk. This exercise were enlightening in the sense that it became clear that we do very similar movements for many different tasks (quite a few involving working with the laptop on the knees or on a table in front of us). One of the core themes of the talk was that we should consider movement and (non-exercise) physical activity when designing for work, so we don’t end up e.g. sitting on a chair for several hours while working. This is a very good point and it’s related to one of the main focuses of the lecture and Helena’s research in general “movement is part of a sustainable society” (see picture above). Helena also showed some practical examples of e.g. walking meetings, which I really want to try myself. A few years ago I was one of the participants in one of her studies about activity in the office. I should e.g. use a training bike and walk on a treadmill while working on some tasks in parallel. Since then I have actually began working from a training bike every now and then when I work from my home!  🙂

The other lecture focused on VR solutions for phobic treatment. Johan Lundin, Joakim Blendulf and Hedda Nyman from Stockholm county council as well as my former KTH colleague (there have been a lot of those popping up during this week’s activities 🙂 ) Anders Lundström were the speakers. These were a part of a multi-disciplinary group which involved both psychologists, film makers and engineers. The speakers from Stockholm county council presented a pilot study in which they set out to investigate if VR can be as effective as standard cognitive behavioural therapi for treating agoraphobia. They prepared films (360 degrees) of several threatening situations involving large crowded places and let patients experience the scenes through VR glasses. A very interesting application of VR, which we also got the opportunity to test! I hope they will get promising results! The second part of the lecture, which was more of an exercise, was led by Anders Lundström. It was an ideation exercise where we should use PLEX cards to discuss gamification components in relation to our projects. 

The rest of the time this day was devoted to the projects which we started with yesterday. Today, we started off by finalizing the storyboard for our chosen solutions, whereafter we spent a few hours constructing paper prototypes. Towards the end of the prototyping session the ideas were evaluated by a person from another project group. The results from the evaluation should be used to make final adjustments. Our last project task was, of course to present our ideas with the help of our prototypes. All students had really done a great job with the projects and the presentations!

The organizers really did a great job as well with putting together interesting programs for lectures, project work and all sorts of activities in Dublin, Stockholm and Uppsala! After the presentations I was happy to find out that some of the students actually had initiated a new research community (on Slack) to which all participants were invited! There, we can share moments, information about interesting conferences and papers, etc. So, even though the summer school is officially over, I have a strong feeling this will not be the last blog post I write about activities involving summer school participants outside Uppsala University…

design · eHealth · Summer school

EHealth summer school in Stockholm, day 4!

Jonas Moll1 Comment

This day of the eHealth summer school contained two lectures and several hours of project work – this was the most project focused day so far. Once again it was a very rewarding day. 

Kristina Höök, an interaction design professor from the department Media Technology and Interaction design where I worked earlier, started off the day by talking about soma design. In the picture above you can see her “Soma design manifesto” which will be discussed in her upcoming book on interaction design. Her talk was very inspiring and focused a lot on movement and how we can design with movement in mind. Several examples of design koncepts based on movement were brought up to discussion and fact is that I have tried some of them at KTH during an open house session a few years ago. One example was a design solution with a lamp which light intensity varied with your breathing – it really made it possible to experience breathing in a different way. Another example was a device you laid down, which generated heat based on pressure. The common theme of all examples was that the developed products give an awareness of the body and how it moves. The lecture also contained a practical exercise in which we should sit down relaxed and focus on the state of different body parts as well as the relation between them. This was a very interesting experience especially when it came to thinking about what mechanisms we use when we start and stop breathing. We can do this in soo many ways, but we hardly ever think about it. It became clear that we are different. Most of us are not really symmetrical, especially not if we experience some kind of pain, and we should design with this in mind. After this lecture I’m really curious about that book!  🙂

The other lecture was held by Elina Eriksson, who is also a former colleague, and from the same department as Kristina. Elina focused on ICT and sustainability and her talk was also very engaging. She started out with a very important and serious subject: what is the state of our planet and where are we going (my own interpretation, not a quote)? We definitely have a problem today – the emissions (especially carbon dioxide) are increasing which in turn causes all sorts of highly problematic chain reactions. We also have a problem with resources – e.g. just recently we passed the world overshoot day and it’s not even autumn yet! This is an important topic to really think hard about, but I will not delve deeper into it here. In the other part of her talk she focused more on sustainable development and gave several intereresting examples. It was especially pointed out that the whole life cycle is of importance – not just the usage of a product. We need to consider how and with which resources products are manufactured. The issues in the production or in waste handling might cost much more, in terms of effect on environment, than the actual usage. This is of course problematic when it comes to computers and phones which are often thrown out way before they actually stop functioning (sometimes due to incompatible new software). The lecture also contained group discussions about e.g. development goals which we were adressing and goals that were conflicting. Those who are interested in this topic (should be everyone!) may also be interested in this earlier blog post about a recent talk by Ulf Danielsson (professor from Uppsala University) about the fragile system we are all part of. 

The rest of the day was devoted to project work, which started today. I will just mention the main steps here. We started with defining clear goals, after which we formulated important questions to answer. We also discussed what is needed for success as well as pitfalls that could lead to failure. The next step was a mapping activity, where we defined all stakeholders, data gathering and other key steps in the design cycle.  The next main task was to choose a small part of the idea mapped out and generate several design ideas based on it (everyone in the project group produced 8 examples under time pressure). Each person than expanded on one of the ideas which was than shown to the entire group. The group than decided what parts from everyone’s solutions that should be a part of the final group design. The last project task today was that we started on a story board. 

The day ended with a nice dinner with the entire group of participants and organizers. 

eHealth · games · Summer school

EHealth summer school in Stockholm, day 3!

Jonas Moll1 Comment

As I wrote in earlier blog posts we will spend four days in this week at KTH, Stockholm. We spend those days in the visualization studio. Most of the time we spend at KTH the room will be used to attend lectures and do group work, but this particular day was quite different. Today, we got to try out all sorts of demoes and equipment in the studio as well as 3D-modelling and game development! At the end there was also a short lecture, by interaction designer and professor Jonas Löwgren from Linköping University. He talked about research through design and that e.g. physical artefacts can add something which cannot really be mediated through text and still images. 

The first part of the day was devoted to the demoes, which we tried out after a short walkthrough by Björn Thuresson who is the manager of the studio. I will present some of the games briefly below, without going into technical details. 

In the image above you can see a VR racing car game which is unusual in the way that it requires collaboration. The entire track, as well as a moving indicator showing the car’s position, can be seen on the table top screen. While the program is running, the person sitting in the chair with VR glasses and a steering wheel drives the car while at least one other person gives directions and makes sure that the holes in the track are filled with the square puzzle pieces! 


In the image above you can see another collaborative game. In this game you are controlling a little penguin and the task is to walk around and collect objects in the virtual world. In the world there are lakes (which you can drown in), fields and mountains. The main problem is that most of the objects cannot be reached unless you collaborate with someone who works in the sand box! There is a direct mapping between the topography in the sandbox and the one in the virtual world. If an object is too high up the one controlling the sand box need to start working in order to build up a mountain under the object.  


My last example above shows my colleague from Uppsala University, Ida Löscher, trying to move around in a virtual world (seen on the big screen) collecting objects. The big problem here is that another person can place barriers (in the form of pillars) in the virtual world with the help of a mobile interface, where both the world and player moving around in the world are shown! Once again a multi-user interface, but this time it’s more like a competition. 

These are just a few examples of the many things we got to try out. I really liked the collaborative aspect of the games and I think many interesting research ideas can be born here. All of the games were the result of student projects and I know that some of them have been awarded prices. 

The next part was focused on 3D modelling. Robin Palmberg, a research engineer working in the studio,  introduced the concept whereafter he guided us through a tutorial where we tried out creating a small robot like character in Blender. At the end we could export the code for 3D-printing. The printed robots will be handed out on Friday! I actually understand Blender much better now. 

The last part of the day focused on game development in Unity! We were devided into five different groups in which we focused on different parts of a game. The different parts were:

  1. Physics
  2. Texture and light
  3. Sound
  4. Mechanics
  5. AI

Every group was guided by an expert KTH student! This was a very interesting experience and I really enjoyed seeing the end result which was a combination of the different groups’ work. It was a very hard game, where you should jump between different plarforms but the important thing is that the collaborative effort worked!

DOME · eHealth · Medical Records Online · Summer school

EHealth summer school in Uppsala, day 2!

Jonas Moll1 Comment

The second day of this week’s summer school was spent at Uppsala University in Gustavianum – one of the University’s oldest buildings. This was a lecture intense day, with many interesting areas covered and apart from researchers from Uppsala Univeristy, there was also a physician, an IT-strategist and a manager among the speakers!

The first half of this day was focused on patient accessible electronic health records. Benny Eklund, IT strategist at Uppsala county council, started out by discussing some of the highlights from the winding journey towards establishing patient accessible electronic health records in Sweden. Among other things he mentioned important enablers, barriers and success factors. He also brought up the contrast between the medical professionals’ fears and the patients’ overall positive response towards the possibilities that the system can give. Benny also demoed Journalen. 

The next two talks, about the professionals’ perspective and the patients’ perspective, were related to the contrast that Benny brought up. Christiane Grünloh (see picture above) and Åsa Cajander brought up the professionals’ perspective and I presented the patients’ perspective in the form of results from the national patient survey I have been writing about before on this blog. Common issues raised by doctors were e.g. that they see the record as their work tool (primarily for communication among medical professionals, not with patients), that the workflow can be disrupted (patients see results before they do), and that workload increases (more calls, etc.). When it comes to patients the results are a lot more positive regarding attitudes and possibilities. I will write more about results from the survey when those results are published. 

After lunch Birgitta Wallgren, who has had different manager positions at Uppsala University Hospital for years, talked about work with a new surgical planning system. She made several important points and I will only bring up a few here. One of the main points was that you need to know as well as respect the organization structure if you want to make a change, conduct studies, etc. If you just pick someone in the middle of the organization it will not work – you need to locate the right manager. In this case she managed to gather 19 medical professionals at various levels one day a week during 4 months! That is quite impressive! Another point related to the workflow. She emphasised several times that it is of utmost importance to take the workflow into account when designing new systems – this was the first thing they did when they started to work towards the new surgical planning system the talk focused on (they also mapped out the work process they wanted to have – this is not necessarily the same as the current one). Based on the results they started designing a system which was adapted to the target workflow. The 19 medical professionals mentioned above made sure that the team was on the right track. 

The last speaker was Gunnar Enlund, chief physician at Uppsala University Hospital. He discussed practical consequences of IT-systems in an operating theater. One of his first pictures showed (a simplified) chart with available IT-systems and how they depended on each other. That chart was very complex! He also campared the situation long ago (one doctor for each patient) to the situation today (often over 100 medical professionals per patient). This highlights the importance of 1) designing for working teams and 2) designing systems that are usable for different teams in different parts of the care process. He also brought up several examples of how IT-systems can cause stress. One key problem, which was in focus during the end of the talk was that of integration. Quite often the same information needs to be registered in two different systems, since values entered in one system are not automatically copied! This certainly doesn’t save time! They have been working on this issue for quite some time, but they currently don’t have a working solution for the integration problem. 

Before I end this post I also want to mention today’s lunch break which included a guided tour between some of the important buildings close to Gustavianum (like the cathedral and University library) and Gustavianum itself! Unfortunately I could not take an active part in the guiding activity, but my colleagues from Uppsala University presented one builing and two famous Swedes each. It was a very nice and well organized activity!

Action research · eHealth · Summer school

EHealth summer school in Stockholm, day 1!

Jonas Moll3 Comments

So, finally it’s here – the first day of the second week of the EIT Health/ACM SIGCHI summer school! This time in Stockholm. Great to meet everyone again! As I wrote in my last blog post about the summer school, we got a few things to prepare in advance (a made up citation of our own work and slides to a Pecha Kucha). Before lunch most of the participants presented their slides (6 slides each, 20 seconds per slide, 20 seconds to switch speaker). Unfortunately, mine could not be included, since I had a computer break down and couldn’t reach the file. Everyone who presented today did a good job and it was very interesting to hear a few things about the others and their research interests. I will try to present my own tomorrow. 

The Pecha Kucha was not the only networking activity this morning. There was also a “speed dating” session, led by Åsa Cajander, where we should discuss a few different topics with other participants (preferably participants we hadn’t talked to a lot or worked with before). Everyone paired up for the first topic, then we formed new pairs for the second one and so on. This was a very good exercise and I remember that we did something very similar at the last DOME consortium meeting in Skövde. 

When it comes to the theoretical part, concentrated to the afternoon and focused mostly on action research, the speakers themselves definitely deserve their own paragraph here. Those in charge of the more theoretical parts were Bengt Sandblad, Jan Gulliksen and Åsa Cajander. Bengt started to work within the areas of HCI and medical informatics about 45 years ago. Jan Gulliksen was his Ph.D. student. Later on Åsa Cajander became Jan’s Ph.D. student. Three generations of HCI research using action research methodology (see blog image above)! Perfectly organized! As I have written earlier Åsa is the supervisor of students among the participants, so there were actually four generations present!

Bengt talked about some of the highlights from his 45 years in the field. It was especially interesting to hear about some of the earliest examples of incorporating computers in healthcare. We have definitely come a long way since the time when each hospital had one (expensive) computer which was often operated by specially trained technicians! But there are still problems with today’s electronic health records. Bengt highlighted that these systems have much more potential than is being used today and that there are too many problems. One interesting result related to this was that a study showed that doctors loose about 56 minutes/day due to bad usability! The lecture also brought up specific examples of success factors as well as pitalls related to the area of medical informatics research. Jan Gulliksen focused more on action research theory and the method as such. Among other things he discussed different problems as well as advantages with the method. The method is obviously heavily debated. 

The discussion around problems and possibilities formed the basis for an exercise led by Åsa Cajander. We were first divided into four groups in which we should prepare arguments supporting one of four viewpoints on action research. The two extremes were that action research is nonsense and that action research is the future of all kinds of research, respectively. The other two were in between these. After a few minutes we then formed new groups including one participant from each of the viewpoint groups. In these groups the members should try to convince each other of their own viewpoint. It was a very interesting exercise which really highlighted the ongoing debate about the method. 

eHealth · Medical Records Online · Summer school

Preparing for the second week of the eHealth summer school

Jonas Moll2 Comments

KTH

During the last week of June I wrote a series of blog posts about an eHealth summer school I participated in, together with some colleagues from Uppsala University and KTH as well as several other Ph.D. students and postdocs from around the world. That week of activities, which we spent at Trinity College Dublin, was very well organized and I’m very glad I got the opportunity to be there and experience every part of it. You can read about the content and my experiences of it in these blog posts:

Now, we are approaching the second week of the summer school, which will be held in Stockholm (KTH) and Uppsala (Uppsala University). I’m really excited about getting to meet everyone again and experience a new week filled with interesting lectures and exercises! During the last day of the week in Dublin the organizers of the second week – Jan Gulliksen and Åsa Cajander – presented the plan for the week in Stockholm (you can read a summary of that presentation if you follow the link to Day 5 above). We got two small tasks to work with during the summer:

  1. Come up with a citation of our own work, as a means of illustrating how we want other researchers to cite us.
  2. Prepare a Pecha Kucha (using a template), presenting ourselves as researchers, our research, the citation from 1) and a kind of personal fun fact.

Today, I have been working with those two tasks. Coming up with the citation was certainly not easy, since I have been working in quite a lot of fields. But since everything I do relate to mediated communication and a rather special analysis technique (focusing on how technology affects the means by which we talk to each other) I settled for a citation related to how the methodology I have been using can be applied by others. I will not show the citation here – everything will be revealed during the first day in Stockholm! 🙂

Preparing the Pecha Kucha was also quite hard due to my many research areas. My first idea was to focus entirely on eHealth (since this is an eHealth school), but that would give far from a complete picture of what I’m doing as a researcher. I will instead try to browse through all three of my main areas multimodal communication, eHealth and social media in higher education. I’m really looking forward to see the other participants’ presentations. We will all present just before lunch during the first day in Stockholm.

Preparing the two small tasks mentioned above is not the only thing I need to do before the second week of the summer school starts. During the Tuesday, which we will spend in Uppsala, I will be one of the speakers! I will present and discuss the results from the national patient survey (a short version of that presentation was held at the Vitalis presentation last spring, see this blog post). It will definitely be an interesting experience to be a speaker as well as a participant. Christiane Grünloh, my colleague from KTH, has the same situation – she will, together with Åsa Cajander, present and discuss the professionals’ perspective right before my presentation. During that same day in Uppsala there will also be presentations by medical professionals and other stake holders.

Another thing that was announced the last day in Dublin, during the presentation of the Stockholm week, was that the participants should help deciding what we should do the last two days in Stockholm. Those two days are still blank in the schedule so I guess the content will be revealed during the first day in Stockholm. I’m really looking forward to see what will happen there! Unfortunately, I did not think about it when the ideas for content were collected, but one very interesting activity could be a variant of the critical incident workshop that I wrote about here and here. I really enjoyed that workshop and many interesting ideas came out of it. Anyhow, the presentations and activities during the first three days seem really interesting, so I’m positive we will have two great final Days!

eHealth · Summer school

EHealth summer school in Dublin, day 5

Jonas Moll8 Comments

Today was the last day of the eHealth summer school in Dublin. The lectures, that were of high quality, were fewer today since the whole afternoon was devoted to the projects. This day also contained a talk about the second summer school week in Stockholm. 

My blog posts about the other days:

The three lectures focused on a depression intervention case study, implementation science and ethical design in eHealth. The case study concerned a depression intervention, gNAT’s Island, which started as a research project and is now used by over 1200 mental health professionals! Thus, this is clearly a case of implementation done right. The application, targeting children 10-16 years, comes in numerous variants and the core application is a game focusing on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Needless to say, good collaboration with all stakeholders involved was a prerequisite for the success. It must be very unusual that health professionals use a game as a part of the therapy! 

The implementation science lecture focused on real examples of where implementation had gone wrong – sadly enough quite a few can be found within healthcare. Poor design can have fatal consequences within this area! As many as 70% of systems in healthcare fail, often because of poor implementation. Many things are needed for successful implementation. It’s not enough that you have run a successful pilot trial – you also need to be able to scale up the solution, provide necessary training for care professionals (and maybe also patients), have continous evaluation (not just develop something and leave), etc. 

In the talk about ethical design a rather unusual interactive component was used – the participants should fill in a 4×4 “Ethical Bingo” during the talk! As soon as a word on the Bingo card was mentioned by the speaker, Marguerite Barry, it should be marked. There were no prices, but it was an interesting way to keep the audience alert. Among other things, the talk showed how the view of ethics in design has evolved through the years and how to apply wisdom in design. The presented view on ethical design was very interesting, since most discussions about ethics focus on privacy, data protection and similar. 

The entite afternoon was devoted to the projects. Directly after lunch we got 1,5 hours to prepare a 8 minutes presentation which should contain the elements covered during the project sessions the earlier days:

  • A user scenario introducing the intervention and giving it a clear context
  • The user-centered design process and methods
  • The trial protocol proposed for evaluating the intervention

After a coffee break every project was presented with minimal gaps in between (just pauses for switching computers) and then the jury chose a winning team. Before the jury presented their decision the patient representatives got a chance to talk and they were all very pleased with the results and that they had gotten the opportunity to be a part of the summer school. Apparantly, this is the first time patients have been invited to this kind of summer school. 

This last paragraph about (this week of) the summer school relates to the blog post picture. Jan Gulliksen and Åsa Cajander presented, as organizers for the Stockholm week, what would happen during the second summer school week in August. This time we were asked to prepare 6 slides for a Pecha Kucha during the first day in Stockholm! Parts of that day will focus on the participants getting to know each other a little better. The second day we will be in Uppsala and one of my tasks will be to make sure that everyone gets there in the morning and home again in the evening! Medical practitioners will be among the speakers this day. I was really happy to see that we will have a full day workshop in the very cool visualization studio! I have actually never performed any research tasks in that room despoter the fact that I worked at KTH for years. It will be interesting to find out what will happen during the last two days – the participants was asked to write down ideas for possible themes on post-its and hand them in just before lunch. The week in Dublin has been great and I’m sure we will have a super week in Stockholm/Uppsala as well!

eHealth · Summer school

EHealth summer school in Dublin, day 4

Jonas Moll2 Comments

The fourth day of the eHealth summer school in Dublin included lectures related to inclusive design, internet interventions, trial protocol design and healthcare implementations. As has been the case the earlier days, I found all lectures interesting and I also enjoyed the interactive parts that were included in them. As before, I will bring up a few key points below. 

This was the first day where we got the chance to work on our projects during one of the lectures. During the lecture on inclusive design, we should try to come up with ways to extend our current ideas so that they could be of use for people with multipel illnesses/disabilities – thus we should design for a so called persona spectrum. This part was very interesting for me since I have designed haptic interfaces for collaboration between sighted and visually impaired pupils in elementary school. With this background I have been forced to think about inclusive design and the importance of designing both haptic and audio feedback in a way that provides both collaborating peers with a truly shared workspace. 

Once again Geraldine Fitzpatrick held a very inspiring lecture. The focus this time was more on eHealth design and the importance of gaining insights from involving different stakeholders in the design process. When the picture for this blog post was taken she brought up the idea of using e.g. health coaches in interaction with patients/users. Many other techniques, like home visits/observations and interviews were also mentioned. It is vital that we as researchers and/or designers get to know how technology is really used and this is insights that e.g. care professionals could never provide (the use context is often the patient’s home). One key point was that it is important to invite users continously during the design process and thereby building a kind of relationship with them. 

Heleen Riper’s lectures on interventions and protocols were also interesting – I had no idea that there are approximately 8000 apps for depression interventions available today! Many different examples of interventions were given, including VR environments for targeting different phobias. The importance of basing interventions on scientific evidence was also brought up and during this part of the lecture Heleen approached members of the audience who had to give their views on methods (e.g. meta studies and trials) for gathering such evidence. This was a very good way of keeping the audience active and focused. The same technique was used during the lecture on trial protocols. The last lecture of the day, on healthcare implementation, also included a lot of interactive parts. In that case the speakers wanted to show that we have limited capabilities and that it’s human to misinterpret things and make errors. Several small experiments on perception and multitasking were performed. 

The main project part (as I said above, there was a short workshop on inclusive design during a lecture) was about trial protocol planning. Thus, we should come up with ways to measure if the intervention we designed have the intended effects. We should both come up with a distal outcome (and means of measurkng it) and proximal outcomes for each intervention component. The end result was a study design capable of evaluating the intervention.