User centred design of Orygen virtual worlds: The next generation of telehealth for youth mental health care

Background: Rapid uptake of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic has opened a gateway to improving access to mental health care. However, existing platforms are not fit-for-purpose, resulting in poor treatment engagement. Virtual worlds (VW) are an innovative technology whereby users can meet and interact in real time using personally tailored avatars within 3D virtual environments. VWs may improve engagement and access to youth mental health care by offering a fun and interactive social space, with customizable features capable of supporting delivery of psychosocial treatment. The aim of this study was to develop a purpose-built VW designed to support delivery of youth mental health care. Method(s): A user centred design framework was employed to develop a prototype of Orygen Virtual Worlds (OVW) across 8 sessions with 8 young people with lived experience. Sessions progressed from basic concept validation, through to persona and journey mapping, and finishing with several user testing sessions to iteratively develop the prototype. Result(s): End users (young people) were overall very positive about the potential for VWs to supplement youth mental health services. Iterative feedback and testing identified core features needed to ensure the platform was usable, safe and capable of delivering effective individual, group and peer interventions. Conclusion(s): This presentation will showcase the development of this innovative new platform for delivering engaging, accessible and effective youth mental health care for hard-to-reach youth. Results will be discussed in context of the unique development approach informed by user centred design principles and implementation science.

The Pi-CON Methodology Applied: Operator Errors and Preference Tracking of a Novel Ubiquitous Vital Signs Sensor and Its User Interface

Remote Patient Monitoring has enjoyed strong growth to new heights driven by several factors, such as the COVID-19 pandemic or advances in technology, allowing consumers and patients to continuously record health data by themselves. This does not come without its challenges, however. A literature review was completed and highlights usability gaps when using wearables or home use medical devices in a virtual environment. Based on these findings, the Pi-CON methodology was applied to close these gaps by utilizing a novel sensor that allows the acquisition of vital signs at a distance, without any sensors touching the patient. Pi-CON stands for passive, continuous and non-contact, and describes the ability to acquire vital signs continuously and passively, with limited user interaction. The preference of vital sign acquisition with a newly developed sensor was tested and compared to vital sign tests taken with patient generated health-data devices (ear thermometer, pulse oximeter) measuring heart rate, respiratory rate and body temperature. In addition, the amount of operator errors and the user interfaces were tested and compared. Results show that participants preferred vital signs acquisition with the novel sensor and the developed user interface of the sensor. Results also revealed that participants had a mean error of .85 per vital sign measurement with the patient-generated health data devices and .33 with the developed sensor, confirming the beneficial impact available when using the developed sensor based on the Pi-CON methodology.

E-learning university evaluation through sentiment analysis centered on user experience dimensions

center dot The COVID-19 crisis increased the number of users of university online teaching, enhancing the importance of this learning format. Additionally, ISO 9241-210:2019 standard sets the international standards for the design of products, services and interaction systems from usability, accessibility, and user experience (User eXperience -UX) perspective. Then, in order to design interfaces and learning experiences that include motivations, feelings and needs of end users, it is necessary to previously evaluate the UX of these environments, with less general and/or laborious methods than those that currently exist. Therefore, this work aims to establish the basis of a method that allows automatically to evaluate the UX of online teaching platforms by analyzing the users' sentiment about specific aspects of their virtual learning experience. To do this, 2,035 users were surveyed about their online learning experience with a questionnaire and an open text field to give their opinion. The population surveyed were online postgraduate students of the Universitat de Valencia and the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, and university students of massive open online courses of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia. The opinions collected in Spanish from 476 students were processed with the commercial sentiment analysis and natural language processing tool MeaningCloud, to analyze the sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) about aspects of their experience. The results present a new model that, on the one hand, ontologically classifies categories and aspects of online education with sentiment analysis techniques, and on the other hand, the model groups these categories according to UX criteria, presenting its own classification to facilitate the evaluation of online learning experiences in a concrete and automatic way.

Evaluating Extended Reality Application for a Virtual Museum. Case Study: Remigio Crespo Museum

The COVID-19 pandemic was the main reason why many organisations decided to include information and communication technologies in their processes to allow them to continue with their activities, be it providing services to users (food, medicine, etc.), training/education or disseminating culture. In the field of culture, some museums incorporated technology into their operating environment, moving from face-to-face visits to virtual visits. However, in many museums, the lack of apps designed to solve the problem of virtual visits caused some to stop receiving visitors during the pandemic. In this context, this paper describes the development of an application with a user-centred design that incorporates extended reality to allow virtual visits to the Remigio Crespo Museum in the city of Cuenca (Ecuador). The evaluation carried out to verify the application's usability and learnability is also included. The results obtained indicate that users/visitors found the application usable and easy to learn. © 2022 IEEE.

Experience of Students in Using Online Mental Health Interventions: A Qualitative Study

Online mental health interventions have been posited as a way to reduce the mental health treatment gap among students in higher education. The effectiveness of these interventions is often limited by low user adherence. A potential solution is to improve user adherence by producing user-centred interventions. A total of 452 students from University College Cork, Ireland participated in the survey, "Tell us About Your Mental Health Post-COVID-19”. The survey examined students' mental health over the past year, their use of technological supports, their use of mental health support services and their ratings of mental health support services used. This study explores students' experiences with technological support. The thematic analysis of 138 open-ended responses produced seven main themes: 1) Appeal 2) Barriers to Use 3) Discovery 4) Drawbacks 5) Purpose 6) Reasons for Stopping and 7) Usage Patterns. The results of this study revealed students' openness to using online mental health resources. It also revealed the barriers and facilitators to their use of these resources. Finally, based on our findings, we provide recommendations to researchers/designers developing online mental health interventions for university students. Some of these recommendations were to ensure safety in online communities, provide good user interfaces, support students in crises and improve the accessibility of online resources to students with learning disabilities. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Building Virtual Health Training Tools for Residents: A Design Thinking Approach.

The COVID-19 pandemic drove a rapid transition to virtual care experiences for graduate medical trainees. Core training competencies have expanded to incorporate virtual contexts, however there is limited knowledge of the optimal design of virtual care training tools for learners. In this study, we describe the application of a Design Thinking approach to the identification and co-design of novel training tools to support residents and precepting attending physicians in virtual ambulatory care practice. We applied the model of "Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test" via a mixed methods approach to (1) explore the needs, preferences, and concerns of Internal Medicine residents and outpatient precepting attendings regarding virtual ambulatory care training environments, and (2) evaluate, prototype, and test potential training tools. Eleven residents and eight attending physicians participated. Identified learner needs and problem areas included: improving virtual visit technical skills; acquiring virtual communication skills; adapting to the loss of shared in-person learning space and optimizing virtual learning environments; remediating non-virtual procedural competencies; and educating on new documentation requirements. Key solution areas included: virtual precepting support tools; digital information and education dissemination tools; and strategies for management of technical issues. Several prototypes were proposed, with a single tool (a virtual preceptor tip sheet) deployed in clinical practice. Residents found the workshop program improved their understanding of Design Thinking and its relevance to healthcare. Ultimately, Design Thinking can be deployed to engage medical trainees and precepting attendings in the effective development of novel educational tools for the virtual care learning environment.

User Interface Design for Blood Donor Information Media Using User-Centered Design Method (Case Study UTD PMI Pontianak)

The blood Transfusion Unit of the Indonesian Red Cross (UTD PMI) Pontianak is an organization engaged in blood donation services. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the bloodstock at UTD PMI Pontianak was insufficient. When the bloodstock was insufficient, donor seekers or the families of patients who needed blood would share messages asking for blood on social media. However, people often ignored these messages because they were not addressed to the right donor, as well as donors who often see similar messages but do not match their blood type. One of the factors that caused insufficient bloodstock at UTD PMI Pontianak was the lack of donor motivation in donating blood. The existing blood donor application still had some problems regarding the user interface, and there were still some users' needs that had not been met in the application. For a design to meet the users' needs, the researchers used the User-Centered Design (UCD) method to create a user interface for blood donation information media because UCD focused on user needs to achieve user goals. The prototype was tested for usability using the USE Questionnaire and follow-up interviews. From the results of the USE Questionnaire, the researchers obtained very good usability for every aspect, with a score above 92%. This research also showed that donors and donor seekers felt helped by the prototype of blood donor information media because it could meet the user needs in dealing with the problem they faced. © 2022 IEEE.

The Effect of Implementation of Guideline Order Bundles Into a General Admission Order Set on Clinical Practice Guideline Adoption: Quasi-Experimental Study.

BACKGROUND: Clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) and associated order sets can help standardize patient care and lead to higher-value patient care. However, difficult access and poor usability of these order sets can result in lower use rates and reduce the CPGs' impact on clinical outcomes. At our institution, we identified multiple CPGs for general pediatrics admissions where the appropriate order set was used in <50% of eligible encounters, leading to decreased adoption of CPG recommendations. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to determine how integrating disease-specific order groups into a common general admission order set influences adoption of CPG-specific order bundles for patients meeting CPG inclusion criteria admitted to the general pediatrics service. METHODS: We integrated order bundles for asthma, heavy menstrual bleeding, musculoskeletal infection, migraine, and pneumonia into a common general pediatrics order set. We compared pre- and postimplementation order bundle use rates for eligible encounters at both an intervention and nonintervention site for integrated CPGs. We also assessed order bundle adoption for nonintegrated CPGs, including bronchiolitis, acute gastroenteritis, and croup. In a post hoc analysis of encounters without order bundle use, we compared the pre- and postintervention frequency of diagnostic uncertainty at the time of admission. RESULTS: CPG order bundle use rates for incorporated CPGs increased by +9.8% (from 629/856, 73.5% to 405/486, 83.3%) at the intervention site and by +5.1% (896/1351, 66.3% to 509/713, 71.4%) at the nonintervention site. Order bundle adoption for nonintegrated CPGs decreased from 84% (536/638) to 68.5% (148/216), driven primarily by decreases in bronchiolitis order bundle adoption in the setting of the COVID-19 pandemic. Diagnostic uncertainty was more common in admissions without CPG order bundle use after implementation (28/227, 12.3% vs 19/81, 23.4%). CONCLUSIONS: The integration of CPG-specific order bundles into a general admission order set improved overall CPG adoption. However, integrating only some CPGs may reduce adoption of order bundles for excluded CPGs. Diagnostic uncertainty at the time of admission is likely an underrecognized barrier to guideline adherence that is not addressed by an integrated admission order set.

The Covid-19 Decision Support System (C19DSS) – A Mobile App

The COVID-19 pandemic remains a concrete challenge, especially in communities and rural areas where health resources are scarce. We recently developed several classifiers, useful to predict safe discharge, disease severity, and mortality risk from COVID-19, fed by routine analyses collected in the Emergency Department. In this paper, we discuss a system, made up of an app and a server, that enables doctors to use these models during the management of COVID-19 patients. The app has been developed involving the doctors since the early phases of the app design, then revised in the light of two usability cycles. We report its main features and its ease of use. So far, it has been used during the fourth wave, producing accurate results with patients that did not complete the vaccination protocol (i.e., up to the second dose). © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Long COVID Diary - Design and Development of a Support Application for People with Long COVID

Due to the COVID pandemic more and more people suffer from mid-to long-term problems associated with it. COVID can also cause a wide range of health issues over a longer period of time, which has been called Long COVID. Due to the wide range of symptoms and the fact that Long COVID is relatively new, there is a lack of applications supporting Long COVID patients. In this paper, a newly developed solution of a Long COVID patient support application is being discussed. It is based on the previous identification of requirements from questionnaires of patients with Long COVID, where they expressed their needs and wishes for such a solution with additional identified ones. This paper focuses on designing and developing an application containing the respective derived requirements to help and support people suffering from Long COVID. © 2022 IEEE.

Workids: Kids Homework Planner to Enhance Learning and Motivation in a Meaningful Way

School activities had to be moved to a virtual environment in order to keep the population safe from Covid-19. However, even though educational platforms proved to be rather useful during this episode by allowing classes to continue;one must not overlook the fact that these platforms were hardly adapted for the most elementary levels. Moreover, when children enter school, they need a lot of support from both parents and teachers. Then again, they also need to eventually develop autonomy and ownership on their school assignments. During lockdown, the by-product of homework became more complicated due to the need to upload exercises done on paper to an online space. Therefore, following a human-centered approach, this project pursues the goal of helping school-age children achieve more independence when doing homework incorporating digital tools. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

HCI Research Experiences During the Pandemic: Lessons Learned for the Road Ahead

The social interaction restrictions imposed by COVID-19 required academic researchers to rethink the design of their research projects, especially those that involved human interaction. Considering this scenario, we report here the experience of conducting four studies in Human-Computer Interaction research projects that were adapted to be executed remotely: a focus group study, a communicability evaluation study, a speculative design study and a user observation study. Considering how the studies were planned, executed and analysed, we reflect on the adaptations needed, and lessons related to our experiences. From these lessons, we believe that, even after all the pandemic restrictions are lifted, we may continue conducting at least part of our research studies remotely to increase our geographical reach, reduce costs and facilitate data capture.

The Covid-19 Decision Support System (C19DSS) – A Mobile App

The COVID-19 pandemic remains a concrete challenge, especially in communities and rural areas where health resources are scarce. We recently developed several classifiers, useful to predict safe discharge, disease severity, and mortality risk from COVID-19, fed by routine analyses collected in the Emergency Department. In this paper, we discuss a system, made up of an app and a server, that enables doctors to use these models during the management of COVID-19 patients. The app has been developed involving the doctors since the early phases of the app design, then revised in the light of two usability cycles. We report its main features and its ease of use. So far, it has been used during the fourth wave, producing accurate results with patients that did not complete the vaccination protocol (i.e., up to the second dose). © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Digital Literacy-Based User Experience Design for Medication-Allergy Patients Care

Digital literacy is not based solely on an understanding of technology, but is highly influenced by social and cultural context. This study focused on developing mobile applications for medication allergy care for respiratory-related patients in daily life, which is based on inclusiveness and digital literacy. With COVID-19, there are growing needs to share the role of primary care hospitals, with, for example GPs, and self-care symptom records applications, in order to supplement the saturated medical service of general hospitals. The mobile application of ‘medication-allergy record for respiratory-related patients’ which is developed in this study considers cultural digital literacy and provides the solutions to the local people’s needs. For these objectives this study has conducted field research and analyzed the influential factors and needs in digital interaction, by interviewing 120 outpatients of respiratory and allergic internal medicine department in general hospital in Cheongju. Based on this, the direction of the mobile application has developed new information architecture and relevant wire-frames. This study will contribute to the future direction of non-face communication in health-care service by suggesting a self-data-producing digital health care service by bridging the personal culture and user-centered technology. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.

Mental States and Cognitive Performance Monitoring for User-Centered e-Learning System: A Case Study

The unprecedented long-term online learning caused by COVID-19 has increased stress symptoms among students. The e-learning system reduces communications between teachers and students, making it difficult to observe student's mental issues and learning performance. This study aims to develop a non-intrusive method that can simultaneously monitor stress states and cognitive performance of student in the scenario of online education. Forty-three participants were recruited to perform a computer-based reading task under stressful and non-stressful conditions, and their eye-movement data were recorded. A tree ensemble machine learning model, named LightGBM (Light Gradient Boosting Machine), was utilized to predict stress states and reading performance of students with an accuracy of 0.825 and 0.793, respectively. An interpretable model, SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanation), was used to identify the most important eye-movement indicators and their effects on stress and reading performance. The proposed model can serve as a foundation for further development of user-centred services in e-learning system. © 2022 The authors and IOS Press.

Learner-Centered Design of Online Courses: A Transdisciplinary Systems Engineering Case Design

Societal shifts associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have exposed challenges associated with online engineering education. These challenges encompass both those inherent to the digital learning environment and those associated with the scalable presentation of content to learners with a range of different backgrounds, learning goals, and user attributes. Universal design principles can be applied to benefit all learners in some cases (e.g., modularized content, captioning of audiovisual material). However, some interface configurations for content presentation and contextualization may benefit one type of learner at the expense of others (e.g., the expertise-reversal effect). Such examples of conflicting user needs indicate a demand for adaptable interfaces that inform the information architecture and user experience interface design. A case design approach applied to a transdisciplinary systems engineering course identifies three primary interface components to target for adaptation: (1) the initial topical 'entry point' into the course content, (2) the preferred presentation medium (e.g., text notes, presentation slides, or video), and (3) the navigation mechanisms supporting exploration of the learning environment and highlighting interconnections amongst the material. These adaptations address diversity in backgrounds, learning priorities, presentation preferences, and levels of expertise to appropriately scaffold the learning process for the diversity of learners experiencing transdisciplinary courses. © 2022 The authors and IOS Press.

Interaction Design for Interactive Learning in MOOCs using User-Centered Design Approach

Education is the key to progress the development of a nation because a great nation must have a strong educational foundation. However, the poor quality of education becomes the obstacle that often occurs. The quality of education is influenced by the interaction of communication in the learning process. Therefore, the interactive learning method could be the solution to improve the quality of interaction and communication in the learning process. Even more, interactive learning could improve the learning gain and conceptual understanding through the interaction of students in the learning process. However, several challenges are faced in the learning process due to the pandemic. Interaction in learning is limited to break the chain of COVID-19 transmission. The learning model has to be adaptive during the pandemic to improve its continuity through online learning. Therefore, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) could be the answer to offer the course for the learning process in an organized and structured online classroom environment. Based on the user research, we analyze the user needs and requirements to implement interactive learning methods, discussion and think-pair-share using user-centered design approach in ISO 9241-210:2010. The outcome of this research is to create a high-fidelity prototype that has usability goals efficient to use, effective to use, and user experience goals helpful for students. We validate the interaction design using usability testing with SEQ, SUS, and Completion Rate during testing with the user. © 2022 IEEE.

From now on: experiences from user-based research in remote setings

The COVID-19 disease changed our society in many ways. The social distancing restrictions became mandatory as governments measure to limit the virus spread. These restrictions forced medical appointments, events, meetings, classes, and research experiments, to name a few, to move to an online format. In this new scenario, researchers were also required to redesign their studies, especially the user-based ones. While the virus is still a threat, researchers focus on understanding its long-term effects in research. From this perspective, we explored experiences from three case studies carried out last year: a focus group, a communicability evaluation, and a user observation study. We report on adaptations, challenges, opportunities, and lessons learned in conducting researches with human participation during the social restrictions. The main contribution of this work is a reflection on difficulties, advantages, and changes that may remain in a post-pandemic period from the experiences we met as Human-Computer Interaction researchers in conducting such remote studies. We conclude that the three methods analyzed could be successfully performed with small adjustments without compromising the user involvement in performing the tasks of each study.

Guest editorial: Advancing integrated care with digital health innovation issue editorial: Managing Community Care

The proposed framework, being applied in Finland, acts as a set of standards to format data to allow it to move from one place to another (known as the “middle layer” in interoperable systems) bringing together different data elements to support a Virtual Care Operator model – an “information-focused approach to integration, coordination and continuity of care.” Domains in this model focus on technology, team organization, program support, integration of information systems, performance and quality, with maturity assessed on how well the model is enabling integration of service delivery around coordination of activities and other key issues like equity. Aird and colleagues present an implementation focused evaluation, using a multi-method approach to explore the roles and use of a new system of information exchange between one hospital and one long-term care home in Canada. Stamenova et al. evaluate a virtual visit program put in place to provide access to care during the COVID-19 pandemic using a convergent mixed-methods design which draws on usage data, surveys and interviews with patients and provider users of virtual care systems across different units within a hospital.