Medical images taken with mobile phones by patients, i.e. medical selfies, allow screening, monitoring and diagnosis of skin lesions. While mobile teledermatology can provide good diagnostic accuracy for skin tumours, there is little research about emotional and physical aspects when taking medical selfies of body parts. We conducted a survey with 100 participants and a qualitative study with twelve participants, in which they took images of eight body parts including intimate areas. Participants had difficulties taking medical selfies of their shoulder blades and buttocks. For the genitals, they prefer to visit a doctor rather than sending images. Taking the images triggered privacy concerns, memories of past experiences with body parts and raised awareness of the bodily medical state. We present recommendations for the design of mobile apps to address the usability and emotional impacts of taking medical selfies.

With the rise of COVID-19 cases globally, many countries released digital tools to mitigate the efects of the pandemic. In Germany the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) published the Corona-Data-Donation-App, a virtual citizen science (VCS) project, to establish an early warning system for the prediction of potential COVID-19 hotspots using data from wearable devices. While work on motivation for VCS projects in HCI often presents egoistic motives as prevailing, there is little research on such motives in crises situations. In this paper, we explore the socio-psychological processes and motivations to share personal data during a pandemic. Our fndings indicate that collective motives dominated among app reviews (n=464) and in in-depth interviews (n=10). We contribute implications for future VCS tools in times of crises that highlight the importance of communication, transparency and responsibility. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; HCI design and evaluation methods; Human computer interaction (HCI); Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.

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The training of healthcare staff is an important aspect in reducing adverse events related to medical devices. For medical devices, e-learning has been shown to be a successful method for knowledge acquisition (e.g., Grundgeiger et al, 2016). However, research addressed the learning of clinical skills to a lesser extent. Hands-on learning seems to be superior to conventional classroom learning when it comes to long-term-memory performance (e.g., Hearns, Miller, & Nelson, 2010). This study examined whether using a syringe pump while learning improves the skills to operate the pump, subjective confidence when using the pump, and knowledge about the pump compared to a training without the pump. We tested two groups of nursing students. One group received training with an e-learning module and a syringe pump for hands-on practice (e-learning + pump, n = 25), whereas the other group used the e-learning module only (e-learning only, n = 26). In the first session, the participants were asked to conduct a 35-minute training session, followed by a questionnaire, a knowledge test, and a skills test. In a follow-up session, the tests were repeated but these results are not part of this abstract. Ethical approval was obtained from the local ethics committee and the participants gave their informed consent. The independent variable was learning method and was manipulated between participants. One group was instructed to make use of a syringe pump placed next to the e-learning computer during the e-learning module (e-learning + pump). The second group did not have the syringe pump while learning (e-learning only). The main dependent variable was the number of tasks solved in the skills test. In addition, we investigated the participants’ subjective confidence in operating the syringe pump, their knowledge about the pump, and the amount of assistance that the participants needed to solve the tasks. Based on the literature, we expected that the e-learning + pump group would solve more tasks in the skill test, is more confident in using the pump, and would require less assistance compared to the e-learning only group. The difference of the proportion of solved tasks in the skills test between e-learning + pump group and the e-learning only group was not significant. There was even a slight descriptive advantage for the e-learning only group. For the confidence rating, we observed no significant difference between the groups. In the knowledge test, the e-learning + pump group performed slightly better than the e-learning only group, but the difference was not statistically significant. To assess the amount of required assistance, we counted every sub-task for which a participant needed assistance, regardless of the amount of assistance given per sub-task. Again, there was no effect of the learning method. The results suggest that, with the current study design, there is no benefit of having the device at hand. One may argue that the power of our study might have been too low to find a statistically significant difference between the learning methods. However, because our main independent variable indicated a trend in the opposite direction, we conclude that the current e-learning + pump training does not provide any benefits over e-learning only. The null-effect found in the present study may be due to the split-attention effect. Participants in the e-learning + pump group were told to use the syringe pump combined with the e-learning application. Therefore, they had to switch between the e-learning application and the syringe pump in an unsteady manner to receive all of the relevant information. Considering the split-attention effect (Ayres & Sweller, 2014), switching back and forth might have increased the participants’ cognitive extraneous load (Sweller et al., 1998). Although our results are somewhat unexpected, our study showed that “just” providing a device and instructing healthcare staff to use the device alongside a e-learning module does not improve learning outcomes. Based on the literature (Keers et al., 2013), however, there is a need to improve learning. Future studies should develop and evaluate innovative approaches to teach clinical skills in order to improve overall patient safety.

In the context of medical device training, e-Learning can address problems like unstandardized content and different learning paces. However, staff and students value hands-on activities during medical device training. In a blended learning approach, we examined whether using a syringe pump while conducting an e-Learning program improves the procedural skills needed to operate the pump compared to using the e-Learning program only. In two experiments, the e-Learning only group learned using only the e-Learning program. The e-Learning + hands-on group was instructed to use a syringe pump during the e-Learning to repeat the presented content (section “Experiment 1”) or to alternate between learning on the e-Learning program and applying the learned content using the pump (section “Experiment 2”). We conducted a skills test, a knowledge test, and assessed confidence in using the pump immediately after learning and two weeks later. Simply repeating the content (section “Experiment 1”) did not improve performance of e-Learning + hands-on compared with e-Learning only. The instructed learning process (section “Experiment 1”) resulted in significantly better skills test performance for e-Learning + hands-on compared to the e-Learning only. Only a structured learning process based on multi-media learning principles and memory research improved procedural skills in relation to operating a medical device.

Online health communities provide a knowledge exchange platform for a wide range of diseases and health conditions. Informational and emotional support helps forum participants orient around health issues beyond in-person doctor visits. So far, little is known about the relation between the level of participation and participants' contributions in online health communities. To gain insights on the issue, we analyzed 456 posts in 56 threads from the Dermatology sub-forum of an online health community. While low participation threads ('short threads') revolved around solving an individual's health issue through diagnosis suggestions and medical advice, participants in high participation threads ('long threads') built collective knowledge and a sense of community, typically discussing chronic and rare conditions that medical professionals were unfamiliar with or could not treat effectively. Our results suggest that in short threads an individual's health issue is addressed, while in long threads, sub-communities about specific rare and chronic diseases emerge. This has implications for the user interface design of health forums, which could be developed to better support community building elements, even in short threads. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; HCI theory, concepts and models.

Background Health-related misinformation on social media is a key challenge to effective and timely public health responses. Existing mitigation measures include flagging misinformation or providing links to correct information, but they have not yet targeted social processes. Current approaches focus on increasing scrutiny, providing corrections to misinformation (debunking), or alerting users prospectively about future misinformation (prebunking and inoculation). Here, we provide a test of a complementary strategy that focuses on the social processes inherent in social media use, in particular, social reinforcement, social identity, and injunctive norms. Objective This study aimed to examine whether providing balanced social reference cues (ie, cues that provide information on users sharing and, more importantly, not sharing specific content) in addition to flagging COVID-19–related misinformation leads to reductions in sharing behavior and improvement in overall sharing quality. Methods A total of 3 field experiments were conducted on Twitter’s native social media feed (via a newly developed browser extension). Participants’ feed was augmented to include misleading and control information, resulting in 4 groups: no-information control, Twitter’s own misinformation warning (misinformation flag), social cue only, and combined misinformation flag and social cue. We tracked the content shared or liked by participants. Participants were provided with social information by referencing either their personal network on Twitter or all Twitter users. Results A total of 1424 Twitter users participated in 3 studies (n=824, n=322, and n=278). Across all 3 studies, we found that social cues that reference users’ personal network combined with a misinformation flag reduced the sharing of misleading but not control information and improved overall sharing quality. We show that this improvement could be driven by a change in injunctive social norms (study 2) but not social identity (study 3). Conclusions Social reference cues combined with misinformation flags can significantly and meaningfully reduce the amount of COVID-19–related misinformation shared and improve overall sharing quality. They are a feasible and scalable way to effectively curb the sharing of COVID-19–related misinformation on social media.