Synthesis Lectures on Technology and Health – serie

Demographic trends and increasing support costs means that good design for older and disabled people is an economic necessity, as well as a moral imperative. Alan Newell has been described as "a visionary who stretches the imagination of all of us" and "truly ahead of his time." This monograph describes research ranging from developing communication systems for non-speaking and hearing-impaired people to technology to support older people, and addresses the particular challenges older people have with much modern technology. Alan recounts the insights gained from this research journey, and recommends a philosophy, and design practices, to reduce the "Digital Divide" between users of information technology and those who are excluded by the poor design of many current systems. How to create and lead interdisciplinary teams, and the practical and ethical challenges of working in clinically related fields are discussed. The concepts of "Ordinary and Extra-ordinary HCI", "User Sensitive Inclusive Design" , and "Design for Dynamic Diversity", and the use of "Creative Design" techniques are suggested as extensions of "User Centered" and "Universal Design." Also described are the use of professional theatre and other methods for raising designers' awareness of the challenges faced by older and disabled people, ways of engaging with these groups, and of ascertaining what they "want" rather than just what they "need." This monograph will give all Human Computer Interaction (HCI) practitioners and designers of both mainstream and specialized IT equipment much food for thought. Table of Contents: 40 years--Highlights and a Brief Review / Communication Systems for Non-Speaking and Hearing-Impaired People / TV Subtitling for Hearing-Impaired People / Word Prediction for Non-Speaking People and Systems for those with Dyslexia / Providing Reusable Conversation for Non-Speaking People / Story Telling and Emotion in Synthetic Speech / Lessons Learned from Designing AAC Devices / IT Systems for Older People / Designing IT Systems for Older People / Ordinary and Extra-Ordinary Human Computer Interaction / User Sensitive Inclusive Design / The Use of Professional Theatre / Attacking the Digital Divide

Essential characteristics are delivering service to patients in their own home, having the patient's priority activities be the focus of therapy, using cognitive prosthetic software which applies Patient Centered Design, and videoconferencing with a workspace shared between therapist and patient.

Subsequent case studies address themes in a variety of hospital settings, which highlight the variability that is experienced across study settings and the importance of context in shaping what is possible when conducting research in hospitals.

Conducting fieldwork for investigating technology use in healthcare is a challenging undertaking, and yet there is little in the way of community support and guidance for conducting these studies. There is a need for better knowledge sharing and resources to facilitate learning. This is the second of two volumes designed as a collective graduate guidebook for conducting fieldwork in healthcare. This volume brings together thematic chapters that draw out issues and lessons learned from practical experience. Researchers who have first-hand experience of conducting healthcare fieldwork collaborated to write these chapters. This volume contains insights, tips, and tricks from studies in clinical and non-clinical environments, from hospital to home. This volume starts with an introduction to the ethics and governance procedures a researcher might encounter when conducting fieldwork in this sensitive study area. Subsequent chapters address specific aspects of conducting situated healthcare research. Chapters on readying the researcher and relationships in the medical domain break down some of the complex social aspects of this type of research. They are followed by chapters on the practicalities of collecting data and implementing interventions, which focus on domain-specific issues that may arise. Finally, we close the volume by discussing the management of impact in healthcare fieldwork. The guidance contained in these chapters enables new researchers to form their project plans and also their contingency plans in this complex and challenging domain. For more experienced researchers, it offers advice and support through familiar stories and experiences. For supervisors and teachers, it offers a source of reference and debate. Together with the first volume, Fieldwork for Healthcare: Case Studies Investigating Human Factors in Computing systems, these books provide a substantive resource on how to conduct fieldwork in healthcare. Table of Contents: Preface / Acknowledgments / Ethics, Governance, and Patient and Public Involvement in Healthcare / Readying the Researcher for Fieldwork in Healthcare / Establishing and Maintaining Relationships in Healthcare Fields / Practicalities of Data Collection in Healthcare Fieldwork / Healthcare Intervention Studies “In the Wild” / Impact of Fieldwork in Healthcare: Understanding Impact on Researchers, Research, Practice, and Beyond / References / Biographies

Designed Technologies for Healthy Aging identifies and presents a variety of contemporary technologies to support older adults’ abilities to perform everyday activities. Efforts of industry, laboratories, and learning institutions are documented under four major categories: social connections, independent self care, healthy home and active lifestyle. The book contains well-documented and illustrative recent examples of designed technologies—ranging from wearable devices, to mobile applications, to assistive robots— on the broad areas of design and computation, including industrial design, interaction design, graphic design, human-computer interaction, software engineering, and artificial intelligence.

This book examines the neurological and physical causes of several speech disorders and their clinical effects, and demonstrates how modern technology can be used in practice to manage those effects and improve one's quality of life.

In recent years, these efforts to understand the moving body have been transformed by significant advances in sensing technologies and computational analysis techniques all offering new ways for the moving body to be tracked, measured, and interpreted.

Assistive Technology Design for Intelligence Augmentation presents a series of frameworks, perspectives, and design guidelines drawn from disciplines spanning urban design, artificial intelligence, sociology, and new forms of collaborative work, as well as the author's experience in designing systems for people with cognitive disabilities.

Have you ever experienced the burden of an adverse event or a near-miss in healthcare and wished there was a way to mitigate it? This book walks you through a classic adverse event as a case study and shows you how.It is a practical guide to continuously improving your healthcare environment, processes, tools, and ultimate outcomes, through the discipline of human factors. Using this book, you as a healthcare professional can improve patient safety and quality of care.Adverse events are a major concern in healthcare today. As the complexity of healthcare increases-with technological advances and information overload-the field of human factors offers practical approaches to understand the situation, mitigate risk, and improve outcomes.The first part of this book presents a human factors conceptual framework, and the second part offers a systematic, pragmatic approach. Both the framework and the approach are employed to analyze and understand healthcare situations, both proactively-for constant improvement-and reactively-learning from adverse events.This book guides healthcare professionals through the process of mapping the environmental and human factors; assessing them in relation to the tasks each person performs; recognizing how gaps in the fit between human capabilities and the demands of the task in the environment have a ripple effect that increases risk; and drawing conclusions about what types of changes facilitate improvement and mitigate risk, thereby contributing to improved healthcare outcomes.

This book introduces zero-effort technologies (ZETs), an emerging class of technologies that require little or no effort from the people who use them.

This book provides an in-depth review of the historical and state-of-the-art use of technology by and for individuals with autism. The design, development, deployment, and evaluation of interactive technologies for use by and with individuals with autism have been rapidly increasing over the last few decades.

AgeTech refers to the use of technologies, such as information and communication technologies (ICTs), robotics, mobile technologies, artificial intelligence, ambient systems, and pervasive computing to drive technology-based innovation to benefit older adults.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most prevalent childhood psychiatric condition, with estimates of more than 5% of children affected worldwide, and has a profound public health, personal, and family impact. At the same time, a multitude of adults, both diagnosed and undiagnosed, are living, coping, and thriving while experiencing ADHD. It can cost families raising a child with ADHD as much as five times the amount of raising a child without ADHD (Zhao et al. 2019). Given the chronic and pervasive challenges associated with ADHD, innovative approaches for supporting children, adolescents, and adults have been engaged, including the use of both novel and off-the-shelf technologies. A wide variety of connected and interactive technologies can enable new and different types of sociality, education, and work, support a variety of clinical and educational interventions, and allow for the possibility of educating the general population on issues of inclusion and varying models of disability.This book provides a comprehensive review of the historical and state-of-the-art use of technology by and for individuals with ADHD. Taking both a critical and constructive lens to this work, the book notes where great strides have been made and where there are still open questions and considerations for future work. This book provides background and lays foundation for a general understanding of both ADHD and innovative technologies in this space. The authors encourage students, researchers, and practitioners, both with and without ADHD diagnoses, to engage with this work, build upon it, and push the field further.

This book describes an overlooked solution to a long-standing problem in health care. The solution instead begins with traditional software techniques designed to integrate novel functionality for clinical decision support and electronic health record (EHR) tools.

This book presents three important technology-based rehabilitation interventions that follow the concepts of neuroplasticity. These interventions are: functional electrical stimulation therapy, which produces coordinated muscle contractions allowing people with paralysis to perform functional movements with rich sensory feedback;

This book looks at how AgeTech can support the autonomy and independence of people as they grow older.

This book outlines the development of the Trace R&D Center as an institution for furthering accessible and assistive technologies.

This book outlines the development of the Trace R&D Center as an institution for furthering accessible and assistive technologies.

Overall, the intent of the book is to inspire engineers, computer scientists, industrial designers, clinicians and healthcare providers, social scientists, students, policy makers, and older adults and their caregivers to collaborate in advancing the supportive smart home space to develop more options for aging in place.

Significant health-industry human resource needs increase the reliance on family and friends to support older adults hoping to age in place. This book explores how recent improvements in integrated home technologies have the potential to address those challenges. The book considers how embedded home sensors can be used to monitor the health and wellbeing of older adults and how that can be used to assist with supporting safety and well-being. The content is designed to help multiple stakeholders in the supportive smart home space to better understand the complexity of this field and the need for transdisciplinary collaboration. These stakeholders include the older adults who will benefit from supportive smart home technology;  informal and formal caregiver and healthcare professionals concerned about the older adult’s well-being; researchers from multiple disciplines in the supportive smart home area and their funders; companies looking to develop solutions and servicesor expand their offerings; policy makers who want to ensure privacy and equity in access and a successful integration of these technologies into the evolving health and social services sectors; and students, the future leaders in AgeTech. Overall, the intent of the book is to inspire engineers, computer scientists, industrial designers, clinicians and healthcare providers, social scientists, students, policy makers, and older adults and their caregivers to collaborate in advancing the supportive smart home space to develop more options for aging in place.

This book provides a thorough introduction to the many facets of designing technologies for autism, with a particular focus on optimizing visual attention frameworks.

This book provides a thorough introduction to the many facets of designing technologies for autism, with a particular focus on optimizing visual attention frameworks.

This book explores one way in which recent hardware and software advances have placed humanity on the precipice of a significant shift in how technology can shape our interactions with the world around us: the application of transformative extended reality (XR) technology solutions to support the health, wellness, quality of life, and independence of older adults living with and without cognitive impairments. The book provides an overview of the state-of-the art research on XR-based solutions utilizing virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), challenges that can addressed with these technologies, evidence to date on the efficacy of these solutions, and the nature of these solutions and challenges to their implementation. It explores practical ways XR can be integrated into health and lifestyle maintenance activities for older populations in a diversity of situations through thematic chapters using realistic personas and scenarios. These thematic chapters are organized around the AGE-WELL Challenge Area topics, including staying connected, healthy lifestyles and wellness, mobility, and cognitive health, as well as an additional emphasis on leisure. Other chapters provide guidance on important issues to consider when designing XR-based solutions for older adults, how to evaluate and test XR solutions, the implementation of the user-centered design process, and the book concludes by highlighting unanswered questions and future research directions. This book approaches XR for older adults with and without cognitive impairments from the authors’ diverse research backgrounds in psychology, engineering, gerontology, and design. It will be of interest to academic and industry professionals as well as care providers considering the potential for XR interventions now and in the future.

This book explores the transformative potential of digital technologies to achieve more effective and integrated health care for older adults. It examines the biological and social processes of aging through personas and scenarios, highlighting their impacts on current and future health care delivery systems. It provides a global perspective on the development of health care systems, discussing barriers and opportunities for reform and innovation within the context of policymaking and health technology assessment. Focusing on home care, rehabilitation, long-term care, and primary care, the book offers insights and tools to enhance these services for older adults. It addresses the critical adoption of standardized electronic health records, emphasizing their importance for accessibility and interoperability within health care systems. Readers are introduced to conceptual models and ethical considerations that frame the challenges and opportunities in health care. The book showcases various AgeTech innovations, pilot projects, and initiatives that can address the health care needs of older adults, improving their independence and quality of life. Additionally, it identifies key areas for future research and innovation in AgeTech, encouraging readers to engage with questions and issues that promote continuous thinking about health care reform and AgeTech integration.Targeting a diverse audience, the book aims to inspire and mobilize business leaders, educators and trainees, researchers, innovators, policymakers, health care providers, and citizens—especially older adults. By presenting evidence and practical strategies, it underscores AgeTech’s role in creating a continuous, integrated, and learning-oriented health care delivery system.

While not intended to be exhaustive, this book covers basic information on common obstacles and barriers to technology development and adoption, things to keep in mind when using technology, and making the most of what is available to support older adults in staying connected.

The Age of AgeTech: Essays to Inspire, Change, and Challenge explores technology's role in addressing the challenges and opportunities of aging, one of the most profound demographic shifts of the 21st Century that has shaped economies, healthcare systems, and social structures worldwide. This book of essays explores the evolving field of AgeTech and its core role in shaping the future of aging. It critically examines the funding landscape for aging research, the integration of AI and robotics in elder care, digital inclusion efforts, and the ethical implications of innovation in AgeTech. The book draws from the author’s personal experience and research expertise, presenting a compelling call to action for interdisciplinary collaboration and investment in transformative solutions. Designed for researchers, professionals, policymakers, and students, the book provides an accessible yet thought-provoking perspective on how technology can enhance the lives of older adults while addressing systemic challenges in healthcare and aging services. These essays provide a roadmap for those committed to shaping a future where technology enhances aging with dignity, independence, and equity.