Can the group effect dominate the influence of the child on the parent's decision to care for type 1 diabetes?

AIM: To understand how the interaction of peer parents in disease-specific social media groups influences their daily treatment decisions. DESIGN AND METHODS: We examined the content of the largest Hungarian Facebook group for parents of children with type 1 diabetes mellitus, analyzing 28 days of activity using netnography. In addition, we undertook an online quantitative questionnaire to identify group members' (n = 267) attitudes. RESULTS: In exploring the influence of the community on the decisions of peer-parents, we found that the respondents could be divided into two clusters. The main difference between the clusters was that committed parents sought the online community for advice and asked questions more frequently, and the peer-support community was a more important part of their self-image. Comparing the influence of online communities and children on the parents' decisions, we observed that the community had the most significant impact on attending diabetes-specific events, while children had the greatest influence on meals and leisure time and were often in conflict with parents. CONCLUSIONS: Social media strongly support the integration of prescribed therapy into daily routine. The influence of the child with diabetes on parental decisions shows that diabetes education needs to become child-centered and that the parent-child relationship should be considered as a crucial element for therapy effectiveness. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS: Online parenting groups provide mental support in coping with diabetes and would serve as a primary non-medical information source; the healthcare staff must be supportive or even encouraging when parents join such groups.

Physiological measurements in social acceptance of self driving technologies.

The goal of the present study is to examine the cognitive/affective physiological correlates of passenger travel experience in autonomously driven transportation systems. We investigated the social acceptance and cognitive aspects of self-driving technology by measuring physiological responses in real-world experimental settings using eye-tracking and EEG measures simultaneously on 38 volunteers. A typical test run included human-driven (Human) and Autonomous conditions in the same vehicle, in a safe environment. In the spectrum analysis of the eye-tracking data we found significant differences in the complex patterns of eye movements: the structure of movements of different magnitudes were less variable in the Autonomous drive condition. EEG data revealed less positive affectivity in the Autonomous condition compared to the human-driven condition while arousal did not differ between the two conditions. These preliminary findings reinforced our initial hypothesis that passenger experience in human and machine navigated conditions entail different physiological and psychological correlates, and those differences are accessible using state of the art in-world measurements. These useful dimensions of passenger experience may serve as a source of information both for the improvement and design of self-navigating technology and for market-related concerns.