A Scenario-Based Study of Doctors and Patients on Video Conferencing Appointments from Home

Telemedicine systems that involve the use of video conferencing technologies have been available for more than three decades. Yet, they have primarily been used for specialist appointments or within health care facilities. We are now seeing a shift with the proliferation of commercial technologies, such as smartphone apps that allow people to have appointments with a general practitioner from nearly any location for various reasons. Telemedicine has also seen an uptake due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, little is known about how doctors and patients perceive smartphone-based telemedicine systems, what types of medical ailments are best suited for these systems, what sociotechnical challenges might emerge through their usage, and how systems should be designed to best meet the needs of both doctors and patients. Thus, we applied a scenario-based design method by presenting a set of medical situations to both general practitioners and patients, and conducted contextual interviews with them to investigate their thoughts on video-based appointments for a range of medical situations. Results show that video consultations using smartphone apps could raise challenges in delivering appropriate care and utilization, conducting camera work to assist different types of examinations, supporting doctor-patient relationship creation and maintenance, allowing doctors to maintain control over the appointment, as well as protecting patients' and doctors' privacy. This suggests the need to create designs that can support particular workflows, relationship building, safety and privacy protection, and camera work for varying contexts. © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery.

Family and Friend Communication over Distance in Canada during the COVID-19 Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, communication technologies have allowed people to maintain connections with their loved ones over distance. At the same time, we do not yet have a deep understanding of if and how communication needs amongst family and friends change as a result of physical distancing and travel restrictions and how technologies could be better designed to support these needs. For these reasons, we conducted an exploratory study to investigate the use of communication technologies and family communication needs during the first fourth months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada. We used contextual interviews with 18 participants and an open-ended survey with 12 respondents. Our results show that people began the pandemic with a period of shifting and trialing new communication practices;this included increased communications with family and friends. People tried to recreate in-person situations with large group video calls beyond the typical two-household connection found pre-pandemic. This created challenges related to control and participation, and saw people explore ways to increase a sense of shared atmosphere over distance with efforts to increase physicality. Yet large amounts of technology use generally did not persist as participants abandoned many forms of online interaction over time in a form of technology detachment and sometimes cleanse. These results point to design lessons for times of extreme disconnection between family and friends, such as during a pandemic, where control, participation, and atmosphere receive deep consideration. © 2021 ACM.