Informatics, Volume 4, Issue 2 (June 2017) – 8 articles

User-based research is strongly recommended in design for older adults. The aim of this paper is to focus the attention on the poorly explored role of medical and para-medical personnel’s perspective on home health care technologies using data that have been gained during the “Active Ageing At Home” (AA@H) project. A focus group was organized at the National Institute of Health & Science on Ageing (INRCA) in Italy. Results demonstrate that several challenges deserve a stronger effort by the whole research sector on ageing and technology: (1) a leading role of the participatory design process; (2) the assessment of the added value of health technologies through robust methods; (3) the definition of an unique identity and well established practices among disciplines; (4) the creation of favorable prerequisites and conditions to the technology uptake. Full article

Omaha System problem concepts describe a comprehensive, holistic view of health in simple terms that have been represented in a set of prototype icons intended for universal use by consumers and clinicians. The purpose of this study was to evaluate Omaha System prototype icons internationally across ten languages through an on-line survey and in-person focus groups. The icons were generally rated above 3 on a scale of 1 to 5 by 1568 survey respondents, with notable exceptions for some of the more abstract concepts. Overall, the icons were rated 3.49 on a scale of 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree, with a range of 3.09 (Japanese language) to 3.88 (Norwegian language). A pattern of differential agreement was noted among respondents from Asiatic languages compared to all other languages. Feedback from survey respondents and focus group participants was used to refine the icons. General themes related to icon development were synthesized from focus group interviews. Further research should continue to refine and evaluate the icons in different languages for international use to support health literacy through visual literacy. Full article

Limited adoption of mobile technology for informal learning and continuing professional development within Australian healthcare environments has been explained primarily as an issue of insufficient digital and ehealth literacy of healthcare professionals. This study explores nurse supervisors’ use of mobile technology for informal learning and continuing professional development both for their own professional practice, and in their role in modelling digital knowledge transfer, by facilitating the learning and teaching of nursing students in the workplace. A convenience sample of 27 nurse supervisors involved with guiding and supporting undergraduate nurses participated in one of six focus groups held in two states of Australia. Expanding knowledge emerged as the key theme of importance to this group of clinicians. Although nurse supervisors regularly browsed Internet sources for learning and teaching purposes, a mixed understanding of the mobile learning activities that could be included as informal learning or part of formal continuing professional development was detected. Participants need educational preparation and access to mobile learning opportunities to improve and maintain their digital and ehealth literacy to appropriately model digital professionalism with students. Implementation of mobile learning at point of care to enable digital knowledge transfer, augment informal learning for students and patients, and support continuing professional development opportunities is necessary. Embedding digital and ehealth literacy within nursing curricula will promote mobile learning as a legitimate nursing function and advance nursing practice. Full article

The visual exploration of large and complex network structures remains a challenge for many application fields. Moreover, a growing number of real-world networks is multivariate and often interconnected with each other. Entities in a network may have relationships with elements of other related datasets, which do not necessarily have to be networks themselves, and these relationships may be defined by attributes that can vary greatly. In this work, we propose a comprehensive visual analytics approach that supports researchers to specify and subsequently explore attribute-based relationships across networks, text documents and derived secondary data. Our approach provides an individual search functionality based on keywords and semantically similar terms over the entire text corpus to find related network nodes. For examining these nodes in the interconnected network views, we introduce a new interaction technique, called Hub2Go, which facilitates the navigation by guiding the user to the information of interest. To showcase our system, we use a large text corpus collected from research papers listed in the visualization publication dataset that consists of 2752 documents over a period of 25 years. Here, we analyze relationships between various heterogeneous networks, a bag-of-words index and a word similarity matrix, all derived from the initial corpus and metadata. Full article

Social media has become ubiquitous to modern life. Consequently, embedding digital professionalism into undergraduate health profession courses is now imperative and augmenting learning and teaching with mobile technology and social media on and off campus is a current curriculum focus. The aim of this study was to explore whether patterns of social media use for personal or informal learning by undergraduate health profession students enrolled at an Australian university across four campuses has changed over time. A previously validated online survey was administered in 2013 to a cohort of health profession students as part of an Australian survey. In 2016, the same survey was distributed to a later cohort of health profession students. Three open-ended questions to elicit descriptive information regarding the use of social media for study purposes were added to the later survey. A comparative analysis of both cohorts was undertaken and social media acceptance and penetration was shown to increase. Health profession students are now more interactive users of Facebook and Twitter, and they have become more familiar with career development sites, such as LinkedIn. The maturation of social media platforms within a three-year period has created realistic opportunities to integrate social media for personal and study purposes into the health profession education curriculum to ensure student understanding of the necessity for maintaining digital professionalism in the workplace. Full article

The advances in social media offer many opportunities for developing understanding of different countries and cultures without any implications of travel. Nursing has a global presence and yet it appears as though students have little knowledge of the health and social care needs and provision outside their local environment. Our collaboration across three countries, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the United States of America, brought the two themes together with the aim of senior student nurses having a communication channel to explore public health issues in each country. Using a closed Facebook™ page, third year undergraduate adult nursing students were invited to take part in a three month pilot study to test the feasibility of virtual collaboration through exchanging public health issues. Here we report upon the collaboration, operation of the social media, and main findings of the study. Three core areas will be reported upon, these being the student’s views of using social media for learning about international perspectives of health, seeing nursing as a global profession and recommendations for future development of this positively reviewed learning technique. To conclude consideration will be given to further development of this work by the collaborative team expanding the countries involved. Full article

The apparent speed and impact of creating a global digital landscape for health and social care tells us that the health workforce is playing catch-up with eHealth national programmes. Locating how and where the profession of nursing fits with future models of health service delivery is critical to provide focused engagement for the populations they serve. In 2016, Dublin City University (DCU) School of Nursing and Human Sciences (SNHS) created a research and development centre for International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP^®) in Ireland. This paper provides a summary of the first year of the centre’s research, describing how the initial activities link to the development of global eHealth policy. A key aspect of service delivery relates to defining care requirements, specifically to support sustainable intersectoral healthcare. Considering how nursing-sensitive language (clinical terminology) is best mapped is necessary to articulate the care requirements and processes to achieve optimal patient outcome. The World Health Organisational Framework for Integrated Care provides a pathway for crystallising the steep learning curve that the profession has currently found itself situated in, to deliver on contemporary digital healthcare. Full article

The increasing use of social media is revolutionizing the way students learn, communicate and collaborate. Many of the skills used with social media are similar to those needed to work in a knowledge-based society. To better understand student nurses’ use of social media in relation to their learning, an anonymous survey was distributed to all undergraduate nursing students enrolled at one nursing school in New Zealand in 2015. A 75% response rate (n = 226) found that almost all (99%) students use social media outside their studies. However, in relation to their study, 61% use social networking sites (such as Facebook) on a daily basis and only four students (2%) do not use social media at all. Professional networking sites are used far less in relation to study, with 65% not using these networks at all. The most common digital option used to communicate and work with fellow students was online groups and document sharing sites, such as Google docs, were also popular. The study provides a useful baseline on social media use by student nurses. Implications from this study include opportunities for educators to incorporate social media into teaching and learning activities, including its safe and ethical use. Full article