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Older adults may be excluded from using digital health technologies due to limited eHealth literacy. Research is much needed to decrease disparities in eHealth literacy and increase the inclusiveness of such technologies. Integrating the preferences and expertise of older adults is key to age‐appropriate design of eHealth tutorials. This study explores how participatory design (PD) techniques can be adapted to include older adults in the design of an eHealth tutorial. We worked with 9 older adults (aged 64 and 82) as co‐designers and conducted PD sessions over 11 weeks in a senior center's computer lab. Using thematic analysis, we identified 7 themes around the design of eHealth tutorials for older adults. We also identified successes and challenges in PD with older adults, along with benefits of partnering with senior centers. Our findings have implications for both the design of eHealth tutorials for older adults and for PD with older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile phone technology empowers individuals with vision impairment to submit images with questions and promptly receive answers from remote humans through visual question answering applications. This study aimed (a) identify challenges for visually impaired users of VizWiz, a visual question answering (VQA) application, to obtain information about medication packaging and (b) recommend design guidelines for better supporting this population to receive visual assistance. Using our four‐category coding scheme, we analyzed the quality of 265 images (131 with questions; 134 without) of medication packages from VizWiz. We found that 46% of the images were legible, 40% contained clear indicators for what information was sought, 40% had minimum background clutter, and only 5% total contained sufficient information to definitively answer the users' questions. We also conducted a thematic analysis to identify major challenges in having their questions answered. Major challenges we identified include: image legibility, incomplete display of key information, and a lack of clarity on what information is being sought. We recommend designers pay more attention to how the technology can facilitate training of users on best practices and provide additional tools to aid visually impaired users in capturing good quality images that can be used to answer their questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As information and communication technologies (ICTs) are increasingly used to support and deliver health care, access to Internet-based health services is enabling consumers to play an active role in their own health care. Today, this requires consumers to have a certain degree of health literacy within the context of e-health. To understand the extent to which existing studies have addressed health literacy within the context of Internet-based services, we conducted a systematic review of the literature. We performed four rounds of selection to identify relevant publications: database selection, keyword search, screening titles and abstracts, and screening the full text. This process produced a final sample of 42 publications. The findings from our review provide insights into how health literacy has been, and should be, addressed in the e-health era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To assess our collective understanding of how consumers use patient portals, we conducted a systematic literature review focusing on understanding patients and caregivers' perceptions, needs, requirements, and use of patient portals with the goal of informing the design of effective patient portals. Through multiple rounds of screening, we identified 56 relevant publications for analysis. The preliminary analysis suggested that patient portals are implemented in a wide range of health care settings, ranging from large medical centers to small primary care facilities. Patient portals primarily target patients with chronic conditions. Many aspects of the use of patient portals were covered in the literature, including users' use of specific portal functions (such as managing medications and accessing imaging results), their attitudes toward patient portals, and barriers to patient portal use. Our findings call for more attention from information science researchers to contribute to this important area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal health records (PHRs) are on the rise in recent years. To understand why and how people use (or not use) PHRs, it is critical to understand what they value. This paper reports preliminary findings from a thematic analysis of journal articles related to PHRs. Our analysis identified six values with ethical import as being particularly salient to the use of personally identifiable information in this literature: privacy, confidentiality, security, transparency, trust, and human agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can basic human values be used to predict end‐of‐life (EOL) decision making? Millions of Americans suffer from Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD), yet many ADRD patients do not have advance directives, leaving their loved ones unprepared to make decisions on their behalves. Since EOL care preferences are often treated as a taboo topic, it is important to find ways to predict EOL care preferences in cases where they are unknown. This paper sets out to identify any correlations between basic human values and EOL care preferences. A survey of 50 caregivers found that individuals who highly valued benevolence preferred more care (p<0.01), while individuals who highly valued power preferred less care (p<0.01). This study provides preliminary evidence supporting the use of basic human values as a proxy for EOL care preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore new approaches for combining manual and automatic content analysis. We compare three approaches to topic modelling: Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), and Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP). We applied all three approaches to study a corpus of 21,085 free‐response answers to questions from the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey. We built topic models using the algorithms. Our preliminary results indicate that LSA and LDA yielded more useful results than HDP. We thematically analyzed the topic models and found similarities and differences in the factors that influenced patients' satisfaction with doctors and nurses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]