The memory stone: a personal ICT device in health care

New technology enables novel ways of sharing information between health care recipients and providers. In this study, however, we found that the medical information for pregnant women in Denmark is located in a number of different places, that midwives and doctors spend a considerable amount of time administrating data, and that consultations are felt to be rather inefficient. This paper describes these problems and some solutions. We explore the idea of providing each woman with a digital artifact, called the Memory Stone. The goal is to supply them with tools to collect and review clinical and personal information concerning their pregnancies. The paper discusses: (1) the user-centered methodology for development of a personal device for health care information, (2) the design and evaluation of prototypes, and (3) critical issues concerning the introduction of novel personal ICT in a health care setting. The main focus is on the experiences and interests of the individual pregnant woman in the study. Several insights were gained into more general pervasive health care issues, including technical and ethical ones as well as safety and security concerns.

[1]  L. Suchman,et al.  Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice , 1999 .

[2]  Morten Kyng,et al.  Users and computers: A contextual approach to design of computer artifacts , 1996, Scand. J. Inf. Syst..

[3]  Morten Kyng,et al.  Design at Work , 1992 .

[4]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity , 1998 .

[5]  Claus Bossen,et al.  A web of coordinative artifacts: collaborative work at a hospital ward , 2005, GROUP.

[6]  William Buxton,et al.  Graspable user interfaces , 1996 .

[7]  Hiroshi Ishii,et al.  Tangible bits: towards seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms , 1997, CHI.

[8]  Etienne Wenger,et al.  Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation , 1991 .

[9]  Monika Büscher,et al.  Ways of grounding imagination , 2004, PDC 04.

[10]  A. Butz,et al.  User-centered development of a pervasive healthcare application , 2006, 2006 Pervasive Health Conference and Workshops.

[11]  Marcela D. Rodríguez,et al.  Supporting Context-Aware Collaboration in a Hospital: An Ethnographic Informed Design , 2003, CRIWG.

[12]  Robert Jungk,et al.  Future Workshops: How to Create Desirable Futures , 1996 .

[13]  Konrad Tollmar,et al.  Virtually Living Together: A Design Framework for New Communication Media. , 2000 .

[14]  Michael J Lambert,et al.  Computer-supported monitoring of patient treatment response. , 2004, Journal of clinical psychology.

[15]  Preben Holst Mogensen,et al.  Using Artifacts as Triggers for Participatory Analysis , 1992 .

[16]  Wendy E. Mackay,et al.  The interactive thread: exploring methods for multi-disciplinary design , 2004, DIS '04.

[17]  Konrad Tollmar,et al.  Virtually living together , 2000, DIS '00.

[18]  R. Hepburn,et al.  BEING AND TIME , 2010 .

[19]  Colin Potts,et al.  Design of Everyday Things , 1988 .

[20]  Jonas Tappolet,et al.  Multimodal Interfaces , 2006, Encyclopedia of Multimedia.

[21]  J. Jacko,et al.  The human-computer interaction handbook: fundamentals, evolving technologies and emerging applications , 2002 .