Summary of one of Dr. Siek’s papers, and daily reports…

Dr. Siek’s paper summary:

“Designing a Personal Health Application for Older Adults to Manage Medications: A Comprehensive Case Study” by Katie Siek, Danish U. Khan, Stephen E. Ross, Leah M. Haverhals, Jane Meyers, Steven R. Cali, discusses the development of “a Lesser General Public License (LGPL) open source, web-based Personal Health Application (PHA)”. Such application was created with the purpose of helping older adults with multiple chronic conditions, who often have to “move between facilities or providers during their treatment”,  and their caregivers manage the needed treatments and medications. Methods employed in this research project was participatory design accompanied by Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE)  and Instant Data Analysis (IDA) because such methods had been successfully used in the past in similar projects by researchers. The application was successfully created, mostly from the perspectives of the care providers because they are the ones that manage most of the treatments. In my opinion, this is a very good research paper, for it used appropriate methods to come up with a piece of software that would meet the needs of the older adults, but also the care providers.

 

Daily report:

Today was another fast paced day at IU. We started off the morning by checking HW and blogging, while Dr. Siek gave us more advises about how to improve our blogging skills and how to work better with LaTex. The We had another presentation with Anna in which she talked extensively about the details, strategies, and importance of qualitative research. She also explained how qualitative research connects with quantitative research. Then some of us went to lunch to a Turkish buffet in downtown, and the food was TREMENDOUS! Afterwards, we had another presentation with Ben, in which we learned more about Lilypad Arduino. It is a very cool piece of hardware. Afterwards, we had a presentation with Fernando where he discussed his research and the project that the student researcher under his mentorship will be working on. Afterwards, my project partner and I went to the library to work on our Arduino HW. It was not hard. However, we also had to do a press release on the project in which we had to include a video. Recording ourselves was the hardest part… We kept messing up and laughing about it. It was frustrating and fun at the same time. This week in general has been extremely busy. I am looking forward to not having to do so much HW and just work on my project.

Until tomorrow.