Living with pain, staying in touch

David, Jessica M.; Benjamin, Alison; Baecker, Ronald M.; Gromala, Diane; Birnholtz, Jeremy

doi:10.1145/1979742.1979751

Cited by 16 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Thisresearchbeganbyseekingtounderstandtheexperiencesofolderadultslivingwithchronicpain andhowitaffectsday-to-daycommunication.Aninterviewstudyof27community-dwellingseniors identified existing communication patterns and needs (Benjamin, Birnholtz, Baecker, Gromala, & Furlan, 2012). Two proof-of-concept prototypes of communication technology were built and testedwithasmallnumberofparticipantseach (David,Benjamin,Baecker,Gromala,&Birnholtz, 2011).Theseallowedseniorstosharepicturesasynchronouslywithfamilyandfriendsusingtheir emailaccounts.Thisstudyshowedthatolderadultswithchronicpainwouldadoptcommunication technologyintheirhome.Theypreferredtechnologythatwasaestheticallypleasing,easytouse,and affordable;however,oncetheyhadlearnedtousethetechnologytheyhadhighexpectationsforits capabilitiesthatwerenotmetwiththecurrentprototypes.…”

Section: Evolution Of Intouch: a Social Communication Tablet Applicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Field Study of Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment using Tablets for Communication at Home

Yurkewich

Stern

Alam

et al. 2018

International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction

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This article describes how a tablet-based communication technology designed for older adults was explored for its adoption and impact on family relationships. A case study methodology was employed to collect and analyze interviews, field notes, observations and messaging activity over a 12 week period. Twelve participants, eight with a Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) score suggestive of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), were paired with a student to learn and use InTouch. 1212 messages were sent, from which text, audio, photo, and video data types were used 705, 280, 143 and 84 times, respectively. Most participants voiced that personalized text messaging was not the easiest feature to use, but was their preferred mode. Two participants used audio more than text, highlighting a need for feature customization. Older adults view a simplified tablet-based interface as a valuable means of enhancing communication with friends and family. With guided weekly support older adults learned to use this technology independently and integrated its use into their daily lives.

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Section: Evolution Of Intouch: a Social Communication Tablet Applicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Field Study of Older Adults with Cognitive Impairment using Tablets for Communication at Home

Yurkewich

Stern

Alam

et al. 2018

International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Despite this high prevalence, people who live with chronic pain also face social stigma and high rates of social isolation [4]. More than loneliness, social isolation is correlated with a decreasing quality of life and earlier morbidity [3,5]. As treating this long-term pain means managing it, it is important that caregivers and health professionals find ways to understand the lived experience of chronic pain sufferers-in other words, what it is like to actually live with the debilitating effects of long-term pain and how it impacts a patient's biopsychosocial realities, their ability to function, and their quality of life [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Designing a Virtual Reality Game for Promoting Empathy Toward Patients With Chronic Pain: Feasibility and Usability Study (Preprint)

Tong¹,

Gromala²,

Ziabari³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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BACKGROUND Many researchers are evaluating how digital media may impact the emotional and perspective-taking aspects of empathy in both clinical and non-clinical settings. Despite the growing interest in using virtual reality (VR) and VR games to motivate empathy, few research studies are focused on empathy for people who live with chronic pain. OBJECTIVE Chronic pain affects, by conservative estimates, 1 in 5 people in industrialized countries. Despite this prevalence, public awareness of chronic pain was remarkably low until the recent opioid crisis; as a result, stigma remains a problem frequently faced by people who live with this condition. To address this, the VR game AS IF was created to increase non-patients’ empathy towards the growing number of people who live with long-term chronic pain. Based on our prior work, we overhauled our approach, designed and built a VR prototype, evaluated it and offer design suggestions for future research. METHODS We introduce the design features of the VR game AS IF, and describe the study we devised to evaluate its effectiveness. We adopted a mixed-method approach and compared empathy-related outcomes in both pre- and post-testing. A total of 19 participants were recruited. RESULTS Findings suggest that the VR game was effective in improving implicit and explicit empathy, as well as its emotional and perspective-taking aspects. More specifically, for the Empathy Scale, the total in the pre-test scores (Mean = 47.33, SD = 4.24) and post-test scores (Mean = 59.22, SD = 4.33) did not reach statistical significance (P = 0.08). However, we did find differences in the sub-scales. The Kindness subscale showed a statistically significant increase in the post-test (Mean = 15.61, SD = 2.85) compared to the pre-test (Mean = 17.06, SD = 2.65), P = 0.001. For the Willingness to Help Scale, a significant increase was observed from a t-test analysis (P < 0.0001) of scores before (Mean = 7.17, SD = 2.28) and after (Mean = 8.33, SD = 2.03) the gameplay. The effect size for this analysis was large (d= -1.063). CONCLUSIONS The contributions of this research are that (1) AS IF provides a promising approach of designing VR games to motivate people’s empathy towards chronic pain patients; (2) the study evaluated the potential effectiveness of such a VR approach; (3) the general design suggestions devised from this study could shed light on future VR game systems. CLINICALTRIAL This study has been approved by Office of Research Ethics at Simon Fraser University, trial number 2018s0035.

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