Studies in health technology and informatics
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
Towards interoperability and integration of Personal Health AAL ecosystems.
Due to the changing demographics and cost problems in health systems, an ever increasing portion of the ageing population is ready to use personalized technology for health applications as well as for assistance and care in order to remain in their familiar environment as long as possible. Despite their resulting market potential, Personal Health and AAL (Ambient Assisted Living) solutions are still waiting for broad application. In addition to a lack of viable business models broadly accepted as a main obstacle to market success, further shortfalls of dominating insulated available Personal Health and AAL products are identified. To overcome these, the ongoing European universAAL project and related community building activities of the AALOA Association aim at a broadly accepted unified interoperable open AAL platform that incorporates existing AAL platform concepts and particularly includes the already established ISO/IEEE 11073 standards-based Continua Personal Health ecosystem.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
Mindfulness training online for stress reduction, a global measure.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), stress-related chronic diseases are the main source of death in developed countries. During the last decade, e-mental health, telepsychology or telepsychiatry interventions are showing its growing potential due to the gradual global adoption of the internet and mobile phone technologies. ⋯ Sustained attention and the state of mindfulness experienced in single meditation sessions are also tracked and stored. Correlational analysis yielded to a statistically significant relationship between high scores in stress and low scores in mindfulness facets (p < .001) and between state and trait aspects of mindfulness (p < .01).
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
Mobile Social Networking Health (MSNet-Health): beyond the mHealth frontier.
The purpose of this conceptual paper is to introduce the concept of Mobile Social Networking Healthcare (MSNet-Health). The paper defines MSNet-Health and provides a working scenario of MSNet-Health. The paper suggests various potential domain area applications for MSNet-Health, such as diabetes, antenatal education, smoking cessation, weight loss, and arthritis. Challenges and future research areas are also discussed.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
Analysis of metrics for the usability evaluation of electronic health record systems.
Electronic health records are gradually replacing conventional paper-based health records. For a doctor, it is a working instrument, which can significantly reduce the time spent on paper work. At the same time, patients can benefit from accessing the electronic health records even though they usually do not have a medical background. ⋯ The analysis focused on metrics that are applicable for evaluating GUIs of health information systems. Several approaches and standards have been studied. Finally, a set of metrics and evaluation methods that provide holistic evaluation facilities for graphical user interfaces has been identified.
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Stud Health Technol Inform · Jan 2012
The distributed use of electronic emergency-department whiteboards.
At emergency departments (EDs), electronic whiteboards are introduced to provide a better overview and to support clinicians in spending more time with patients. Often, the main difference between electronic and dry-erase whiteboards is that electronic whiteboards provide distributed access to whiteboard information. We investigate the distributed use of whiteboards at one ED by analyzing seven months of log data. ⋯ The physicians and nurses make little distributed use of the whiteboard and when they do it is to prepare for seeing and to document having seen a patient, rather than in patient rooms with the patients. Important reasons for the limited distributed use among physicians and nurses appear to be a frequent need and practice of visiting the physical information hub of the ED. The information hub features a permanent wall-mounted display of the electronic whiteboard and this display, rather than distributed access, is preferred by physicians and nurses.