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E-Health in Practice

By IGI Global on Mar 11, 2011
Many developed countries are experiencing an aging population, and as the number of elderly in society grows, so too do the medical costs. Some scientists are trying to develop new technologies which can reduce the resulting cost burdens and human resource shortages. For example, several years ago Japanese researchers developed Twendy-One, a robot designed to perform caretaker duties.
Other innovations designed to decrease health care costs include the development and implementation of E-Health technologies. In IGI Global's recently released book, Human-Centered Design of E-Health Technologies: Concepts, Methods and Applications, editors Martina Ziefle and Carsten Röcker discuss how aging populations create "an increased need for intelligent medical technologies, which enable people to live independently at home."

"While current research," they write, "focuses mainly on technological and medical aspects, thereby taking also legal and economic constraints into account, there is a major need to understand in which way physical, emotional and cognitive abilities, caused by individual learning histories and health states, may impact the usage and acceptance of these systems."
The Human Technology Centre (HumTec) researchers continue,
"Hence, not only aspects of technical feasibility, but also acceptance and usability issues of pervasive healthcare applications have to be carefully considered in order to fully exploit the potential of future healthcare applications. Research in the area of e-health technologies has reached a point where significant improvements are only possible if academics and practitioners from various disciplines collaborate in order to develop new strategies for conceptualizing, designing, and implementing new applications."


In Chapter 14 of this title, two Aalborg University professors, Anders Bruun and Jan Stage, stress how usability testing plays a key role in ensuring that consumers of these new technologies understand and can properly interact with Health ICT. They tested the usability of a software system which facilitates home-bound persons' ability to check their blood pressure, blood sugar, and answer health questions remotely before transferring the results to a health care center for analysis.
For their study Professors Bruun and Stage conducted a Video-Based Analysis (VBA) and Instant Data Analysis (IDA) of how five elderly persons aged 61 to 78 with varying degrees of computer knowledge interacted with this software in order to identify whether the IDA process saved time while using fewer resources. They found that "that there is no significant difference between IDA and VBA except for [the identification of] cosmetic problems, and [these problems] are the least important to identify. Thus for identification of important usability problems, IDA's performance is comparable to the conventional approach." A VBA analysis took approximately five times as much as the IDA analysis, they write.

However, both processes identified critical problems with the software. "Even though the application seems simple, it failed to support the user, and that could have fatal consequences in real life use, for example if data about an ill patient were lost because of a user error," they write. "This illustrates a key challenge in developing smart healthcare applications for use by ordinary people."

"The best way to achieve a higher level of usability in such applications," Professors Bruun and Stage assert, "is to conduct formative usability evaluations during development and to use the results in improving the application."

To purchase a copy of Human-Centered Design of E-Health Technologies: Concepts, Methods and Applications, click here: www.igi-global.com/bookstore/titledetails.aspx?TitleId=45949.
To recommend this title to your university librarian, click here: www.igi-global.com/forms/refertolibrarian.aspx?titleid=45949.

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