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Six months progress review (PhD work)
The document discusses how to enhance teleconsultation in rural areas using tangible interfaces to address challenges in physical diagnosis and user interactions. It outlines a research plan involving participant observation, prototyping, and qualitative studies to develop and validate a framework for supporting teleconsultation. The author, Deepti Aggarwal, highlights the importance of understanding user experiences and technical communication in the design process.
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Six months progress review (PhD work)
- 1. SUPPORTING TELECONSULTATION THROUGHTANGIBLE INTERFACES Deepti Aggarwal Interaction Design Lab University of Melbourne Australia
- 2. Health in Ruralareas 12.6 Million fewer health services in rural areas (National Rural Heath Alliance, 2011)
- 3. Ageing population 15.3%of Australian population is over 64 years old. (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011)
- 4. Teleconsultation Use ofelectronic information and communication technologies to provide and support health care when distance separates the participants. (Field 1996; van Dyk 2014; Yellowlees 2005)
- 5. Mediums of Teleconsultation Three mediums: text, audio and visual
- 6. Understanding users’ perspective communicating and dealing with technical issues.
- 7. Supporting physical interactions Difficulty in physical diagnosis over a distance (Field 1996; Pappas & Seale 2009, 2010; van Dyk 2014 )
- 8. Tangible Interfaces Tocapture, shape and convey physical interactions (Ishii 2008; Hornecker 2010)
- 9. Thesis statement Howto design tangible interactions to support and enrich teleconsultation? Observation •Gather an understanding of teleconsultation through participant observation. Prototyping • Explore the design space to develop research prototype(s) Field study •Validate the developed prototype through qualitative studies Study 3 Workshop • Propose a framework or theory to help further explorations through tangible interfaces Study 2 Study 1
- 10. Study 1: Understandingthe user experiences of teleconsultation session Passive observations and semi structured interviews
- 11. Work so far… March - April • Formulating PhD problem • Literature Survey • Collaboration with IEMML and Patricia May-June • PhD coursework • DC presentation • First observation of teleconsultation July • PhD coursework • Observations of MTW training sessions August • PhD coursework • Observations of MTW training sessions • Submitted Ethics application for Study 1 September
- 12. Future Plans •PhD coursework • Observations of MTW training sessions • Submission to DC @CHI 2015 October • Start Study 1 • Writing report/paper of MTW intervention • Writing draft for SRC @CHI 2015 Nov.-Dec. • Study 1 • Submit to SRC @CHI 2015 • Analysis of collected data January • Prepare confirmation report • Start writing for CSCW 2016 February • Confirmation • Writing for CSCW 2016 March
- 13. Timeline Study 1 (CSCW 2016) Study 2 (CHI 2016) Study 3 (CSCW 2017) Thesis 2014 2015 2016 2017
- 14. Teleconsultation: next bestthing Deepti Aggarwal daggarwal@student.unimelb.edu.au
- 15. References Australian Bureauof Statistics, 2010, Regional Population Growth, Australia, 2008-09 Demiris, G., Charness, N., Krupinski, E., Ben-Arieh, D., Washington, K., Wu, J., and Farberow, B. (2010). The Role of Human Factors in Telehealth. Telemedicine and e- Health, 16(4): 446-453. Gagnon, Marie-Pierre, Duplantie, J., Fortin, J., and Landry, R. 2006. Implementing telehealth to support medical practice in rural/remote regions: what are the conditions for success? In Implementation Science. Kawulich, B. B. (2005). Participant Observation as a Data Collection Method. Forum Qualitative Social Research, 6:2, art. 43. Neuman, W. L. (2006). Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6 ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. van Dyk, L. 2014. A review of Telehealth Service Implementation Frameworks. In Environmental Research and Public Health, 11, 1279-1298. Yellowlees, P. 2005. Successfully developing a telemedicine system. In J. Telemed. Telecare, 11, 331-336.
Editor's Notes
- #3 Lets start with some quick facts. Acc to a recent survey, 1/3 of the aus population lives outside the major cities. Also, the health related issues like asthma, smoking and mental well being are found to be quite prevalent in these areas. This population requires a local access to good health care services, which unfortunately is not the case. e.g., another survey points out that the rural areas in 2011 received 12 million fewer health services than what was expected.
- #4 Secondly, australian population is also ageing. Acc to the bureau of statistics, 15% of australian population is currently above 64 years and are thus having issues related to old age such as mobility issues or disability. This population thus requires access to health care services from their home itself. Therefore, in both the cases, there is a bigger demand for health care services than the available resources. So the question is: what can be done here, how to tackle the problem?
- #5 Fortunately, Technology comes to help here. It is possible today to have a remote consultation with a doctor by using a setup called Tele consultation. So what exactly is teleconsultation. It is the method that uses electronic medium for providing health care b/w participants at different locations. The picture here shows a snapshot of how teleconsultation occurs. Teleconsultation usually happens over a video conference such as a skype call. As you can see here, the doctor is communicating with the patient in the mid screen through a video call. The screen on the right side is to read the medical records of the patients like x-ray. Additionally, the left hand side screen is reflecting the doctor end. Almost all the tele consultation session inculdes a similar setup.
- #6 So far, three mediums of communication are explored for the teleconsultation, which are text via email, audio via a telephone call and visual via video call. There have been various studies to find out which medium provides a near best experience to the traditional face to face consultation and visual medium has been found to provide the best experience so far because of its ability to give a good understanding of the user, his environment and the support to make eye contact. Other than that, the advancements in terms of technology is mainly the shift from desktop computers to tablets or other mobile dedicated devices for making a skype call
- #7 By reviewing the lit survey, I found two research opportunities. Although teleconsultation is around from about two decades but so far the research focus has been on determining the technical feasibility for different clinical outcomes y implementing almost the same setup. There is little focus on understanding how the involved users experience its implementation, and how technology can be improved to increase the system usability. Not all the users are familiar with technology. To maintain and implement the setup for a teleconsultation, they have to rely on a technical supporter. However, the studies have shown that the presence of third person makes the patient to speak less and thus effecting the flow of information to the clinician. Therefore, there is a need to design such technology which takes an account of user’s capability, especially when he is sick.
- #8 Teleconsultation today do not support the physical interactions that happen b/w the doctor and patient during a consultation session. Doctors who are known for their magical touch and their ability to sense the patients issues, current technology further puts a limitation here. For example, if a patient is having a wound in his right ankle, he can touch his ankle to give the context of pain when having a face to face consultation. However, this physical touch is not possible through teleconsultation. The patient now needs to convey the location of his wound verbally. Even if the patient takes photographs, the contextual information about the wound is not conveyed to the clinician. For conditions like pains, which is not even visible and can not be captured through technology like cameras, verbal communication becomes more difficult. And it has been found that for a good diagonisis, clinician should get the complete understanding of the health issue, which is possible only if the users are given the right technology. Given that teleconsultation is all about communication, however, not much exploration has been done in the direction of developing new ways of communication medium. Therefore, I am bringing an HCI perspective to teleconsultation that focuses on developing technology while accounting user experience and preferences. for my research, I am interested in exploring tangible interfaces to support physical interactions during teleconsultation sessions.
- #9 So now the question is what is a tangible interface? It is a user interface where a user interacts with the digital medium through the physical environment. For example, a computer mouse, which when dragged over a flat surface moves the cursor on screen accordingly. Tangible interfaces are already very popular in the field of HCI to support variety of tasks, which motivated me to consider it for my research. Why tangible? I believe both doctors and patients are more familiar with the face-to-face consultation, where a patient can touch himself or refer to something else to talk about his medical concerns. Therefore, to bring them closer to the real world experience where people can touch, refer it or carry it around, I lean towards tangible interfaces to support a teleconsultation. I believe that the available tangible interfaces will allow me to capture, shape and convey the physical interactions happening during a teleconsultation session b/w doctor and patient.
- #10 So the main research question of my thesis is: … To answer this question, I propose the following work plan. First I will observe physical interactions are performed during teleconsultation. By gaining insights from the observational studies, I will design the research prototype. Then, to understand the implications of the designed prototype, I will deploy it in various teleconsultation sessions. And at last, I will provide some guidelines to help further explorations of tangible interfaces in the field of teleconsultation.
- #11 Now I will talk about my plans for study 1. This study aims to investigate the experience of users with technology involved in a teleconsultation session. We will focus on the role of technology in facilitating a teleconsultation session and will study how the technology supports the communication between remote participants. Following are the key research questions related to the study: What technologies are currently used to organize a teleconsultation session? How are they setup? What sorts of interactions happen around the technology during the session? 2) Who is involved in a teleconsultation session and what are their respective roles? 3) What is the experience of users involved in the session (e.g., patients, clinicians, helpers, carers)?
- #15 With this I would like to end by saying that Although technology can not really substitute the face to face consultation, but if it is developed properly, it can serve the next best possible way of consultation.