Dirk Volland

Switching the Role of NFC Tag and Reader for the Implementation of Smart Posters

Benefits and opportunities of NFC technology have been discussed for many years. Continuous promises of handset manufacturers to embed this technology into their series of devices anytime soon have been fulfilled only partly so far. Contrasting with that, research and practice have outlined a number of applications that yield great attention among users. Among these applications are Smart Posters. However, the prevailing low market penetration of NFC-equipped smart phones poses a barrier for the implementation of many Smart Poster scenarios. Accordingly, for certain scenarios this paper proposes to switch the role between fixed tags and mobile phones by affixing mobile phones to posters and hand out the much cheaper tags to the users instead. The paper describes the approach and shows its feasibility by reporting lessons learned of a case study.

Towards design principles for pharmacist-patient health information systems

A significant drawback of communications between patients and health professionals is their restriction to face-to-face encounters within healthcare institutions. This limits the support health professionals can provide to ensure patient adherence, which is a significant contributor to therapeutic outcome and overall healthcare expenses. Pharmacist-patient health information systems (PPHIS) have the potential to address existing non-adherence behaviors by enabling pharmacist-patient communication over the time of therapy. Due to the lack of prior research, design principles for PPHIS are derived from the information-, motivation-, and strategy model [4] and feedback from pharmacists in 21 Swiss pharmacies. To demonstrate the feasibility of the design principles, we implement and preliminarily evaluate a PPHIS.

Design and Evaluation of a Mobile Chat App for the Open Source Behavioral Health Intervention Platform MobileCoach

The open source platform MobileCoach (mobile-coach.eu) has been used for various behavioral health interventions in the public health context. However, so far, MobileCoach is limited to text message-based interactions. That is, participants use error-prone and laborious text-input fields and have to bear the SMS costs. Moreover, MobileCoach does not provide a dedicated chat channel for individual requests beyond the processing capabilities of its chatbot. Intervention designers are also limited to text-based self-report data. In this paper, we thus present a mobile chat app with pre-defined answer options, a dedicated chat channel for patients and health professionals and sensor data integration for the MobileCoach platform. Results of a pretest (N = 11) and preliminary findings of a randomized controlled clinical trial (N = 14) with young patients, who participate in an intervention for the treatment of obesity, are promising with respect to the utility of the chat app.

Emerging Patterns of Communication in a Pharmacist-Patient Health Information System

Communication between healthcare professionals and patients is a major determinant of patients’ satisfaction, patients’ adherence, health outcomes, and ultimately of healthcare costs [1]. In most cases, however, personal communication between a healthcare professional and a patient is restricted to episodic face-to-face encounters. Once the face-to-face encounter comes to an end, structured communication ends. The absence of structured communication in time intervals between face-to-face encounters is a defining characteristic of current healthcare professional-patient interaction [2,3]. As a consequence, healthcare professionals lack the ability to guide patients outside the institutional space and to adjust supportive measures depending on particular situations and needs that arise during the therapeutic process.