Question 1Individual Acceptance of Technology Innovations
It can be argued that development of e-Health initiatives is merely a secondary effect or consequence of adopting such technological innovations as personal computing, mobile phones, and internetworking.
Discuss how one or more of the theories (Theory of Planned Behavior, Technology Acceptance Model, Diffusion of innovation, or Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology) or approaches (Domestication) described in your literature review might be adapted to accommodate this view of e-Health.
How might the motivations for acceptance of e-Health initiatives differ if we study the health information provider deciding to use the media rather than the health information consumer?
Question 2Barriers to Adoption of Interactive Health Technologies
The emergence and growth of new technologies and software development that are aimed at mediating and ultimately improving health outcomes for different segments of the world population is encouraging. These advancements appear to hold significant potential health benefits for persons living with various illnesses. For example, interactive health technologies can provide important health information, aid in modifying and/or monitoring health conditions, among other uses.
Sometimes, changes in certain well-established protocols, such as the ways in which health information is approached, sought, and delivered may be accompanied by challenges in information transfer and new user adoption.
From both the individual (personal) and social perspectives, please discuss possible barriers or impositions (e.g., burdens, nuisances, annoyances) that may impact the introduction to and adoption of interactive health technologies.
Also, what are some of the issues that should be addressed in order to overcome barriers to adoption?
What methods/strategies might be employed to measure the usefulness (to users/patients/physicians) of interactive health technologies?
Question 3Cell Phone Culture: The interactions between cell phone culture and health information behaviors
As you noted in your literature review, "the use of mobile phones has developed into a culture, with rules, behavior, patterns and identity." This culture is still evolving, and is likely to interact with researchers' and health practitioners' efforts to use the mobile phone as an instrument for conveying health information.
It could be argued that there are also cultural aspects to health information seeking and health information provision (including specific interventions intended to change health behaviors). These might include (but are not limited to) such aspects as the stigma associated with particular diseases (or ill health in general) and the power relationships between patients and health care providers.
Identify and briefly describe some of the characteristics of the cell phone culture, as identified by Goggins (2006) and others.
Identify and briefly describe some of the cultural aspects of health information seeking and use, as well as health information and health care provision. Focus, particularly, on those that are likely to interact with aspects of the cell phone culture.
Discuss the ways in which these two cultural milieux may interact: both the ways in which they may reinforce each other, as well as the ways in which they may conflict.
Focus more closely on the type of setting or intervention that you may study in your dissertation. What aspects of the cell phone culture are likely to influence people's willingness to use a cell phone as a medium of communication for the purposes in which you're most interested?
Discuss these aspects and the effect they may have on the success of your planned research.
What strategies might you employ to enhance the trustworthiness of your findings? Please include your rationale along with description.
Question 4Future Developments in Information and Communication Technology supporting e-health applications
Cellphone e-health applications have so far been limited in scope and deployment by technology. A number of trends mean that the cellphone of ten years' time can be expected to have certain technical capabilities:
1) The screen will have many, smaller, sharper pixels but the absolute screen size will not increase as the cellphone must maintain its overall portability. So it will not be possible to fit much more visual information than we currently do.
2) Infinite processing power. This will not be because of processor improvements: Moore's law leads to a double of processing power every 18 months, but battery life only improves by 10%, and cellphone processors are limited by the battery life. Rather, it will be because of the availability of massive and cheap computational power through servers that the cellphone connects to and leverages.
3) Infinite connectivity, because speed of connectivity to the Internet on a cellphone is following a curve similar to that described by Moore's law.
Discuss generally the current types of cellphone eHealth services available.
Describe three of these in detail and what each would look like if you assumed the same screen size but infinite processing power and connectivity.
Question 5Methodology in understanding health behavior related to Information and Communication Technologies
Every researcher potentially has a variety of choices to make in the design of a research effort. For example, at a gross level there are the possibilities of decisions about fixed (e.g., structured surveys/interviews) vs. flexible (e.g., ethnographic interviews, observation) designs; extensive (i.e., collecting a relatively thin layer of data from a large number of subjects in order to generalize) vs. intensive (i.e., collecting in depth data from a small number of subjects to explore); and quantitative (i.e., measurements in quantities) vs. qualitative (i.e., measurements in qualities). Design choices of this sort (as well as others) are frequently influenced by the research traditions of the discipline that is involved. Given your interests, which transcend the medical/health field, which tends toward fixed designs, quantitative data, and a sufficient number of subjects to generalize to a population AND studies of information behavior, which tends toward flexible or mixed designs that collect qualitative or mixed data, often intensively from a small number of subjects,
1) Share your thoughts regarding what you would need to do to bridge the health and information fields to develop a research design for your dissertation that would be credible across both fields as it satisfies possibly different trustworthiness expectations.
2) Using these (and any other thoughts that occur to you as you are writing) as a basis, sketch a study design, which seems a reasonable approach to satisfy your own research interests/questions as you strive to bridge what might be seen as a disciplinary gap.
Following are some considerations, which you might use to guide your response if you wish: What sort of research situation (e.g., constructed vs. naturalistic) would be practical? What sorts and numbers of subjects would you be seeking? What data collection strategies might you employ? What analytical tools might support your interpretation of the data that you collect?
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