Introduction to HCI and Consumer Health Informatics Minitrack

There is increasing interest in reaching, engaging, and empowering healthcare consumers directly through various forms of information and telecommunication systems. The success of such initiatives largely depend on how healthcare IT is perceived as usable and useful for its intended audience - healthcare professionals and providers, health consumers and patients. Not surprisingly, it becomes increasingly important and relevant to pay attention to HCI issues in healthcare IT. The objective of this Minitrack is to provide an outlet for sharing research that focuses on improving healthcare IT through an HCI lens. This year, the HCI and Consumer Health Informatics Minitrack team selected five papers from a pool of highly competitive submissions. This year's first article, "Text Simplification Tools: Using Machine Learning To Discover Features That Identify Difficult Text," by David Kauchak, Obay Mouradi, Chris Pentoney, and Gondy Leroy, focuses on tools for analyzing of text difficulty for health consumers. The paper uses six different machine learning algorithms to predict the difficulty of health texts. Our second article, "Alignment of Concerns: A Design Rationale for Patient Participation in eHealth," by Tariq Andersen, Jørgen Bansler, Finn Kensing Jonas Moll, and Karen Nielsen, focuses on divergent concerns of physicians and patients when it comes to illness. The research explores the importance of understanding these differences and provides suggestions for incorporating them in the design of eHealth interfaces. "Video Conferencing as a Tool to Enable Participation in Discharge Planning - Experiences from Implementers regarding the Implementation Process," by Malin Hoff Lander, Lina Nilsson, and Christel Borg, focuses on the challenging task of discharge planning. This research emphasizes the concept of time, including consideration of the time needed to prepare and reflect, and it highlights the importance of leadership in framing the meaning of time during this process. Video conferencing is explored as an IS-based approach to addressing related issues. "Determinants of Vertical and Horizontal Online Health Information Behavior," by Hye-Jin Paek and Thomas Hove, examines two different types of online health information behavior. The article investigates the association between these online behaviors and demographic, psycho graphic, and lifestyle factors. "Magic Mirror for Neurorehabilitation of People with Upper Limb Dysfunction Using Kinect," by Orlando Erazo, Jose Pino, Rosario Pino, and Carmen Fernández, focuses on rehabilitation. It explains how patients requiring neurorehabilitation can receive training using systems developed for the Microsoft Kinect platform, with a focus on natural user interface systems as used by patients. We are honored by the consistent and strong interest in the HCI and Consumer Health Informatics Minitrack and would like to thank all twenty of this year's contributing authors for submitting their outstanding and interesting research.