Jonas Sjöström

The Origin and Impact of Ideals in eHealth Research: Experiences From the U-CARE Research Environment

Background The prevalence of information technology (IT) in society is a foundation for new modes of interaction between patients and health specialists. IT plays an important role in the renewal of care. Several countries have incorporated eHealth plans into their national health strategies. Part of the eHealth evolution concerns Internet psychological treatment and psychosocial care. These interventions are complex to design and evaluate due to legal, ethical, organizational, technical, and methodological challenges. Objective The objective of our study was to seek to make explicit contributions to the understanding of ideals in eHealth research, and illuminate their implications for establishing an effective research environment. Our analysis draws from three years of experience in establishing an eHealth research environment, and the literature. Methods We worked inductively to characterize challenging research ideals, and their origins, in our environment. Thereafter, we made a selective search of the literature to scrutinize and illuminate each ideal and it’s implications. Results In this work, we propose a structured approach to address ideals in eHealth research. The scrutinized ideals are accountability, innovation, rigor, relevance, and sustainability. The approach supports researchers to systematically understand the ideals, their origin, and to manage their implications within an eHealth research environment. Conclusions The complexity of eHealth research causes a need for sustainable, multi-disciplinary research environments. There is a need for a structured approach to organize eHealth research. The proposed approach helps to systematically scrutinize ideals, thus promoting high quality research.

Design principles for research data export: lessons learned in e-health design research

Information technology (IT) allows for large-scale data collection and data analysis, e.g. through logs of user behavior and online surveys. While the issue of structured access to data is extremely important, previous research has not sufficiently emphasized design of data export for research purposes. If researchers are to make their data accessible, they must be empowered to export data in a flexible manner. In this paper, we employ action design research to develop design principles for data export in an e-Health context. Design is informed by a sociomaterial world-view, object-oriented patterns and principles, and usability goals. Through three build-intervene-evaluate cycles in an empirical setting where randomized controlled trials are designed, we propose nine design principles and a conceptual architecture for data export. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

The Semiotics of User Interfaces

Within the IS research field, there are many views on how to understand the use of IT systems. Within the community of organisational semiotics, Stamper’s semiotic framework has been used as a tool to understand information systems at different abstraction levels. Another theory related to organisational semiotics, Information Systems Actability Theory (ISAT), argues that social action theories and speech act theory are needed for a thorough understanding of the use of IT systems in organisations. The use of IT systems is considered to be performance of action within a social context. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on user interfaces of information systems as a means to understand socio-pragmatic and communicative aspects of IS use. The theoretical foundation is based on semiotic and socio-pragmatic theories, and findings from a case study are presented and discussed in order to clarify the argumentation.

Fifteen Challenges in Establishing a Multidisciplinary Research Program on eHealth Research in a University Setting: A Case Study

Background U-CARE is a multidisciplinary eHealth research program that involves the disciplines of caring science, clinical psychology, health economics, information systems, and medical science. It was set up from scratch in a university setting in 2010, funded by a governmental initiative. While establishing the research program, many challenges were faced. Systematic documentation of experiences from establishing new research environments is scarce. Objective The aim of this paper was to describe the challenges of establishing a publicly funded multidisciplinary eHealth research environment. Methods Researchers involved in developing the research program U-CARE identified challenges in the formal documentation and by reflecting on their experience of developing the program. The authors discussed the content and organization of challenges into themes until consensus was reached. Results The authors identified 15 major challenges, some general to establishing a new research environment and some specific for multidisciplinary eHealth programs. The challenges were organized into 6 themes: Organization, Communication, Implementation, Legislation, Software development, and Multidisciplinarity. Conclusions Several challenges were faced during the development of the program and several accomplishments were made. By sharing our experience, we hope to help other research groups embarking on a similar journey to be prepared for some of the challenges they are likely to face on their way.

Privacy and Accountability in Online Communities: Towards a Theory of Scrutiny

Information systems design must balance requirements of privacy and accountability for the good of individuals and society. We ground our study in the context of the design and development of a eHealth system for psychosocial care. Multi-level privacy protections are balanced with the need to provide for accountable interventions in well-defined critical care situations. We identify a set of meta-requirements leading towards a theory of scrutiny.

Respondent behavior logging: an opportunity for online survey design

This work-in-progress paper introduces the concept of Respondent Behavior Logging (RBL), consisting of static and dynamic models that conceptualize respondent behavior when filling in online questionnaires. It is argued that web-based survey design may benefit from logging as a technique for evaluation, since such data may prove useful during re-design of questionnaires. Although other aspects of online surveys have attracted considerable attention both in industry and in literature, how the Web may leverage new and innovative techniques to support survey design is still underexplored. Some preliminary results are reported in the paper, and issues are raised regarding how to appropriately evaluate and demonstrate the qualities of the RBL concept as a means for survey re-design.

Product Semantics in Design Research Practice

The concept of product semantics and its focus on meaning is used to interpret design research as design. It is argued that we may conceive of design research as design in two realms: The practical and the academic. In doing design research, there is a reciprocal shaping of artifacts: Better artifacts (contributions to practice) through appropriation of knowledge and methods from the academic realm, and better knowledge artifacts (contributions to academia) by drawing relevance and experiences of appropriation from the practical realm. We adopt a product semantics view to discuss research as design. Product semantics highlights the meaning of artifacts with respect to their (i) stakeholders, (ii) artifacts-in-use, (iii), artifacts-in-language, (iv) artifact lifecycle, and (v) ecology. Based on this interpretation, we propose activities that should characterize the practice of doing design research. Finally we provide an example of Design Research Practice in action.

In-Place Translation in Information Systems Development

Computers have been considered and appropriated for natural language translation since the late 1940’s. Since the commercialization of the Internet in the early 1990’s, the role of computers to support translation work has expanded. The idea of ‘crowd sourcing’, i.e. engaging website visitors or community members, has been appropriated to enable ‘crowd translation’ or ‘community translation’ of multi-lingual web sites. In this paper, we present Babbler - a novel concept for community translation. The concept is described. A proof-of-concept (software implementation) was built and put into use in an information systems development project. The concept and the software were evaluated through log analysis and interviews with translators. We demonstrate various qualities of the concept and its implementation, including its effectiveness, efficiency, reliability, workflow, implementability and performance. Improvement opportunities, implications for future research and implications for practice are discussed.

Design Science in the Field: Practice Design Research

There exist different types or genres of design science research (DSR) in information systems, like laboratory-oriented and practice-oriented DSR. This paper investigates arguments for a practice-oriented approach to DSR. It uses the research approach of practice research as a starting point to elaborate on a practice-oriented DSR approach we label Practice Design Research (PDR). In doing so, we address two unresolved issues in IS DSR: Theorizing and evaluation. PDR consists of two inter-related sub-activities: theorizing and situational design inquiry. The conduct of situational design inquiry is described as iterative cycles of (1) pre-evaluate, (2) plan & design, (3) test & intervene and (4) post-evaluate. We justify the foundations of these iterative sub-activities/cycles through a theoretically informed argument based on pragmatist philosophy and practice theory.

Software-Embedded Evaluation Support in Design Science Research

Even though the practice of integrating evaluative features into software has long been applied in commercially available software, it is still underrepresented in the Information Systems (IS) community. This paper presents a framework for embedded evaluation support. We are aware of the challenges of evaluation of socio-technical systems and take this issue into consideration in our framework. Our framework is the result of conceptualizations drawing from the evaluation discourse discussion on the topics of artifact evaluation in DSR. We also demonstrate our ideas through two examples of embedded evaluation support mechanisms designed and used in a DSR project in the Swedish healthcare sector.