Philip O’Reilly

Towards Improved Healthcare Performance: Examining Technological Possibilities and Patient Satisfaction with Wireless Body Area Networks

This paper investigates the benefits of using less intrusive wireless technologies for heart monitoring. By replacing well established heart monitoring devices (i.e. Holter) with wireless ECG based Body Area Networks (BAN), improved healthcare performance can be achieved, reflected in (1) high quality ECG recordings during physical activities and (2) increased patient satisfaction. A small scale clinical trial was conducted to compare both technologies and the results illustrate that the wireless ECG monitor was able to detect ECG signals intended for arrhythmia diagnostics. Furthermore, from a patient’s perspective, both technologies were evaluated using three dimensions, namely; hygienic aspects, physical activity, and skin reactions. Results demonstrate that the wireless ECG BAN showed better performance, especially regarding the hygienic aspects. It was also favourable for use during physical activities, and the signal quality of the wireless sensor system demonstrated good performance regarding signal noise and artefact disturbances. This paper concludes that wireless cardiac monitoring systems have significant benefits from a patient’s perspective, and further clinical trials should be conducted to further evaluate the new ECG based BAN system, to identify the possibility of widespread adoption and utilisation of wireless technology for arrhythmia diagnostics.

To M-Pay or not to M-Pay—Realising the potential of smart phones: conceptual modeling and empirical validation

The variety of products and services available through Smart Phones is predicted to increase significantly over the coming years as the commercial potential of Smart Phones for M-Commerce is widely acknowledged. In fact, it is predicted that M-Commerce will achieve in the next three to four years, what E-Commerce has achieved in the last fifteen years. However, while Smart Phones present significant opportunities for organisations, the M-Commerce channel is entirely contingent on consumers’ willingness to not only use these devices to engage in transactional tasks such as bookings, ticketing, and accessing information on products and services, but rather to actually make an M-Payment using the Smart Phone, and as such complete the M-Commerce transactional loop. Hence, M-Payments are a critical enabler of the true commercial value of the Smart Phone. Thus, gaining an understanding of consumers’ perceptions of using Smart Phones to make M-Payments is essential for theoretical explorations of the M-Payment phenomena, and in the practical implementation of M-Commerce services. This paper makes a number of contributions which are relevant to both academics and practitioners. The paper develops and empirically validates a conceptual model for exploring the impact of Vendor and Mechanism Trust on consumers’ willingness to use Smart Phones to make M-Payments for both Push and Pull based products. The empirical findings of the developed Partial Least Squares model illustrate that a pull-based model (where consumers have high levels of control over the transaction process) is the model consumers are most likely to adopt, and most likely to use to make M-Payments. To realise the M-Payments vision, vendors need to clearly communicate to consumers how their data is secured and privacy protected. Furthermore, the findings illustrate the critical importance of ensuring that adequate legislation is in place pertaining to the protection of consumers, and that such legislation is communicated to consumers to maximise their willingness to make M-Payments.

Managing an organisation’s social media presence: An empirical stages of growth model

Abstract The adoption of social media by organisations has proven to be very beneficial; however, few studies have examined how to manage an organisation’s social media adoption and usage. Mismanagement of social media could have significant and unintended consequences for the organisation and its stakeholders. This paper addresses the lack of research in organisational social media management by empirically validating a previously developed conceptual social media stages-of-growth model. Hence, the research objectives are to (1) test empirically that the conceptual stages-of-growth model suits the evolution of social media adoption in organisations, and based on the lessons learned to (2) provide recommendations to revise the empirical model. Furthermore, we propose a three-tier typology for classifying organisations based on the potential of their adopted social media. We argue that the empirical model will foster a better understanding of how social media can be adopted and managed within organisations.

Towards Improved Information Quality: The Integration of Body Area Network Data within Electronic Health Records

An Electronic Health Record (EHR) is internationally recognised as the primary digital format to communicate and store patient clinical information. The vast majority of patient vital sign monitoring solutions provide limited if any opportunities to seamlessly integrate real-time patient vital sign readings e.g. ECG in a coherent or unified approach. In this paper, we highlight the data quality benefits of integrating remote patient monitoring solutions i.e. a Body Area Network (BAN) datasets within patient EHR solutions. The presented Data Management System-Tripartite Ontology Medical Reasoning Model (TOMRM) solution demonstrates how patient care may be improved through the reduction of false alarm generations.

Governance Structures for Open Innovation: A Preliminary Framework

This research-in-progress paper presents a preliminary framework of four open innovation governance structures. The study seeks to describe four distinct ways in which firms utilize hierarchical relationships, organizational intermediaries, and the market system to supply and acquire intellectual property and/or innovation capabilities from sources external to the firm. This paper reports on phase one of the study, which involved an analysis of six open innovation exemplars based on public data. This phase of the study reveals that governance structures for open innovation can be categorized based on whether they (1) are mediated or direct or (2) seek to acquire intellectual property or innovation capability. We analyze the differences in four governance structures along seven dimensions, and reveal the importance of knowledge dispersion and uncertainty to the use of open innovation hierarchies, brokerages, and markets. The paper concludes by examining the implications of the findings and outlining the next phase of the study.

Internet banking systems: An exploration of contemporary issues

Since 1995, Internet banking has allowed consumers to utilise the Internet as a platform to interact with their bank. Initially, the hype surrounding Internet banking was immense. However, more realistic expectations about the value of Internet channels and changes in the financial services sector are affecting opinions of Internet banking systems. This study examines contemporary Internet banking systems in five leading ‘clicks and mortar’ banks operating in the North‐Eastern part of the United States. The findings reveal a move towards viewing Internet banking as an operational rather than a competitive instrument, with consequential changes in how banks evaluate their Internet banking systems. The paper concludes by proposing some changes to expectations on how Internet banking is likely to develop.

Examining the infusion of mobile technology by healthcare practitioners in a hospital setting

While mobile Health (mHealth) holds much potential, the infusion of mHealth is still in its infancy and has yet to achieve sufficient attention in the Information Systems field. As a result, the objective of this paper is to identify the (a) determinants for successful infusion of mHealth by healthcare practitioners and (b) benefits healthcare practitioners perceive from infusing mHealth. A sequential mixed methods approach (case study and survey) is employed to achieve this objective. The study contributes to IS theory and practice by: (1) developing a model with six determinants (Availability, Self-Efficacy, Time-Criticality, Habit, Technology Trust, and Task Behaviour) and three individual performance-related benefits associated with mHealth infusion (Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Learning), (2) exploring undocumented determinants and relationships, (3) identifying conditions that both healthcare practitioners and organisations can employ to assist with mHealth infusion and (4) informing healthcare organisations and vendors as to the performance of mHealth in post-adoptive scenarios.

Conceptualizing Consumer Perceptions of Making M-Payments Using Smart Phones in Ireland

Consumer adoption of smart phones is growing globally at an exponential rate presenting significant commercial opportunities for all organizations. The percentage of the population using mobile phones in Ireland is the largest in Europe, with market revenue of €2 billion in 2009, and 117.3 percent penetration. However, the commercial growth potential of smart phones is being hindered by an industry failure to adopt an accepted m-payment model to facilitate the widespread adoption of m-payments. Furthermore, previous research has shown there is a lack of a willingness among consumers to make m-payments. However, little is known about consumer’s perceptions of m-payments using a smart phone or what factors impact upon these perceptions. In response, this paper develops a theoretical smart phone m-payment model, and applies it using an online survey, to explore Irish consumer’s perceptions of making an m-payments for products/ services using their smart phones. The empirical findings of the developed PLS model, illustrate that respondents display a strong willingness to transact using m-commerce but trust is the key factor in explaining consumer’s willingness to make an m-payment for products/ services using their smart phones. Another significant finding for m-payment com panies is that respondents considered using a secure and trusted third-party payment company as the preferred method of making an m-payment for products/ services. Significant levels of concern regarding perceived privacy control, together with the authority and inde pendence of regulatory bodies and the robustness of the legislative frameworks governing m-commerce, were also very evident from the empirical findings.

RI for IR: Capturing Term Contexts Using Random Indexing for Comprehensive Information Retrieval

In this paper, we present an approach, based on random indexing, to identify semantically related information that effectively disambiguate the user query and improves the retrieval efficiency of news documents. User query terms are expanded based on the terms with similar word senses that are discovered by implicitly considering the “associatedness” of the document context with that of the given query. This type of associatedness is guided by word space models, as described by Kanerva et al.(2000). The word-space model computes the meaning of the terms by implicitly utilizing the distributional patterns (contexts) of words collected over large text data. The distributional patterns represent semantic similarity between words in terms of their spatial proximity in the context space. In this space, words are represented by context vectors whose relative directions are assumed to indicate semantic similarity. Motivated by this distributional hypothesis, words with similar meanings are assumed to have similar contexts. For example, if we observe two words that constantly occur with the same context, we are justified in assuming that they mean similar things. Hence the word space methodology makes semantics computable and the underlying models do not require any linguistic or semantic expertise. Experimental results done on FIRE news collection show that the proposed approach effectively captures the term contexts using higher order term associations across the collection of news documents and use such information to assist the retrieval of documents.

Design requirements for a patient administered personal electronic health record

Published version of a chapter in the book: Biomedical engineering, trends in electronics, communications and software. Intech, 2011 Open Access