I thought it might be a good idea to list any websites or particular posts that I am currently enjoying reading. They will vary and some may not even relate to Health or Technology but some of you may enjoy visiting the sites I mention.
So here is a short list (no particular order) to start to ball rolling:
It's been a while since I last posted on the project I've been working on to develop a social health community site for the Health Department I work for. You can read those previous posts here, here and here.
The plan is to utilize web 2.0 technologies to provide patients and the community with a way of communicating with our staff. In the testing phase, I plan on using our community nurses, their parenting groups and our sexual health nurse to run online groups with their existing clients.
As I have mentioned previously, progress has been painfully slow due to staff shortages and being pulled away to work on another project for a time.
The good news is that I am very close now to releasing the site and I'm getting a little excited and also quite nervous. I feel like a great deal is riding on the success of the project. I will be enlisting the services of a couple of Health promotion staff who will help to establish an evaluation criteria. This will pretty much determine whether the project continues after the testing phase or not.
The evaluation will be quite challenging for me as I tend to gauge success via usage and site stats but I understand that in health, you need much more to determine it's value to ongoing patient care and outcomes.
For me, I've always had a very clear picture of what I want this system to do. I don't mean technically but more how I want it to benefit the users. I've pretty much built the system around this concept and I really hope it was the right way of doing it.
I hope that during testing, I'll get the chance to pick the brains of our testers who in this case will be several mother's groups and an at risk teenage mothers group who are dealing with addiction. Ideally, I would have liked to have met with them before building the system but due to a few factors, this was not possible. Instead, I had to rely on what the community nurses were telling me. This generally occurred through random chats about their work, their challenges, issues, etc.
So next week I meet with the Health promotion team and I'll post an update on how they plan to evaluate my site.
After that, I have a bit of fine tuning and I'll be releasing it to a select group. I may even post the link but you won't see much other than a homepage at this early stage!
I just love reading about technology that is seen as having one role but is utilized for another.
A perfect example of this is the Wii video game controller. To most people, Wii is a game console which offers entertainment and keep the kids quiet during those long school vacation breaks.
But increasingly, I've been reading how Wii is being utilized by physical therapists to help in the rehabilitation of patients. The term being used is Wiihabilitation and judging by the number of facilities using it, is quickly becoming a favorite with patients and therapists.
Wiihabilitation is a popular change from the more traditional forms of physical therapy which patients often refer to as Pain and Torture. The Wii game controller has a unique motion sensor which requires certain body movements that are similar to therapy exercises.
Humans are competitive beasts by nature and I speak from experience when I say that time really does fly when you are engrossed in a video game. So it's no great surprise that patients are really enjoying this new form of therapy.
Of course, no-one is saying that Wiihabilitation is going to take over from the current forms of therapy but it is certainly offering a change for patients who are facing lengthy periods of recovery.
There are quite a few things to really like about this technology use in my opinion;
1: being the very fact that they are using technology in such a neat way
2: utilizing a core objective of the technology for another use (i.e. - competitiveness and our need to beat something!)
3: crosses the age gap. Regardless of your age, the game console offers games that cross the age divide. Whether patients are young or mature, the console is easy enough to pick up. Mature patients are using this technology at home with the grandkids now, how cool is that!
4: engages people. PT can be boring. I know this because my Nan (85) required extensive therapy about two years ago after a leg amputation. It was often tedious and mentally draining for her and provided quite a challenge for therapist to keep the motivation up. Wiihabilitation engrosses people.
5: it's just fun!
Some of the most popular Wii games used in therapy include baseball, bowling, boxing, golf and tennis.
I've included a video showing Wiihabilitation in use plus a great article over at news.yahoo.com.
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