Exploring Community Responses To Health-related Community Displays
Lead Research Organisation:
The Open University
Department Name: Faculty of Sci, Tech, Eng & Maths (STEM)
Abstract
Older adults can face many health challenges as a result of being overweight, including diabetes, heart disease, some forms of cancer and stroke. One way to decrease these risks is by losing weight, which often means increasing the amount of physical activity someone is doing. Both social support and technology devices can support older adults in increasing the amount of exercise they undertake.
This project aims to understand how community support can make fitness tracking technology more effective. We want to explore the use of community displays which receive individuals' health tracking data, combine the data for a community and presenting it, alongside targeted health information, back to the community through shared displays.
Fundamental to this proposal is to work with communities to understand their needs and desires around supporting people's health through community technology. We want to run a series of workshops to better understand the questions communities think we should be asking, and then work with these communities to collaboratively design how the community displays could work.
In doing so, this will have two key benefits. Firstly, the workshops will be designed to be a two-way conversation with older adults, and act as a two-way educational experience. This will empower the community and increase community awareness of health-related activities and behaviours. Secondly, these workshops would help us understand how to utilise citizen science co-design methods in this complex multi-disciplinary setting, allowing us to continue using these methods across other aspects of our research.
This project aims to understand how community support can make fitness tracking technology more effective. We want to explore the use of community displays which receive individuals' health tracking data, combine the data for a community and presenting it, alongside targeted health information, back to the community through shared displays.
Fundamental to this proposal is to work with communities to understand their needs and desires around supporting people's health through community technology. We want to run a series of workshops to better understand the questions communities think we should be asking, and then work with these communities to collaboratively design how the community displays could work.
In doing so, this will have two key benefits. Firstly, the workshops will be designed to be a two-way conversation with older adults, and act as a two-way educational experience. This will empower the community and increase community awareness of health-related activities and behaviours. Secondly, these workshops would help us understand how to utilise citizen science co-design methods in this complex multi-disciplinary setting, allowing us to continue using these methods across other aspects of our research.
Technical Summary
not applicable
Planned Impact
We are proposing a multi-disciplinary programme of research that will demand and deliver contributions across ICT, Healthcare Technologies, and smart cities. The results of the project will address research challenges of how to utilise citizen science methods in the context of three disparate domains, while producing outcomes that are of value to each of those disciplines.
The impact of this project is distinct from the pathway to impact the project would support.
In terms of the direct impact the project will have:
1) The proposed workshops will be designed to be a two-way conversation with older adults, and act as a two-way educational experience. Furthermore, facilitated by CAMK, these workshops will encourage participants to talk amongst themselves, empowering them as a community.
2) Through the close connection with the community via CAMK, we will also increase community awareness of health-related activities and behaviours and develop closer community links between health researchers and local communities, empowering these communities to engage with health innovation.
3) Our CAMK partners will be using the results of the study to inform their practice. CAMK will also be drawing on their links with Age UK and other health-related agencies to lobby for policy changes related to community-related healthcare.
In terms of the pathway to impact, this project would help secure funding for the proposal being developed for the EPSRC. In this sense, the primary impact target of this project is in generating robust research questions around community displays for healthcare, that have been co-developed with community groups. These RQs will form the basis for the EPSRC grant proposal which will focus on the construction of a series of community displays.
The impact from this would include:
1) Older adults in two communities in Milton Keynes increasing their physical activity. We anticipate that half of the people who take part in the trial would increase their physical activity as a result of the community displays.
2) After the technical infrastructure has been implemented, we will be training some community champions on how to maintain the technology, to ensure the system is sustainable beyond the end of the project.
3) Our CAMK and public health partners, will be using the results of the study to inform their practice. They will also be drawing on our links with Age UK and other health-related agencies to lobby for policy changes related to community-related healthcare.
In short, the project will deliver fundamental research framed in an applied healthcare context.
The impact of this project is distinct from the pathway to impact the project would support.
In terms of the direct impact the project will have:
1) The proposed workshops will be designed to be a two-way conversation with older adults, and act as a two-way educational experience. Furthermore, facilitated by CAMK, these workshops will encourage participants to talk amongst themselves, empowering them as a community.
2) Through the close connection with the community via CAMK, we will also increase community awareness of health-related activities and behaviours and develop closer community links between health researchers and local communities, empowering these communities to engage with health innovation.
3) Our CAMK partners will be using the results of the study to inform their practice. CAMK will also be drawing on their links with Age UK and other health-related agencies to lobby for policy changes related to community-related healthcare.
In terms of the pathway to impact, this project would help secure funding for the proposal being developed for the EPSRC. In this sense, the primary impact target of this project is in generating robust research questions around community displays for healthcare, that have been co-developed with community groups. These RQs will form the basis for the EPSRC grant proposal which will focus on the construction of a series of community displays.
The impact from this would include:
1) Older adults in two communities in Milton Keynes increasing their physical activity. We anticipate that half of the people who take part in the trial would increase their physical activity as a result of the community displays.
2) After the technical infrastructure has been implemented, we will be training some community champions on how to maintain the technology, to ensure the system is sustainable beyond the end of the project.
3) Our CAMK and public health partners, will be using the results of the study to inform their practice. They will also be drawing on our links with Age UK and other health-related agencies to lobby for policy changes related to community-related healthcare.
In short, the project will deliver fundamental research framed in an applied healthcare context.
People |
ORCID iD |
| Blaine Price (Principal Investigator) | |
| Daniel Gooch (Co-Investigator) |
Publications
Gooch D
(2021)
A Design Exploration of Health-Related Community Displays
in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Gooch D
(2021)
A Design Exploration of Health-Related Community Displays
in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction - CSCW
| Description | As a result of the series of co-design workshops, we have developed an understanding of the design properties that should underpin public displays for health. Specifically we found three key concerns: -the need for designs to be inclusive, -the benefits of collaboration over competitiveness, and -the advantages of focussing on local concerns. The results of the work were published in this paper: Gooch, Daniel; Price, Blaine; Klis-Davies, Anna and Webb, Julie (2021). A Design Exploration of Health-Related Community Displays. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction - CSCW, 5(CSCW1), article no. 85. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3449159 |
| Exploitation Route | This study provides foundational support for further exploration of community displays to support older adults increase physical activity, validating the concept. Future work should explore whether implementations of such systems can collect meaningful data in the long-term across a community and explore whether such devices can actually increase the physical activity of older adults. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Healthcare |
| Description | For the OU and CAMK, we developed a much clearer understanding of the design criteria for community-based digital health interventions. This will feed into future work we have planned around digital health interventions, both within the community, for individuals and in clinical settings. In terms of capability, the project partners have definitely refined their ability to undertake citizen science projects, particularly focussed around design. CAMK have gained confidence in deploying such methods, so are better positioned to integrate such activities into their practice with community groups and the OU partners are better placed to use these skills in future research projects. In terms of innovation, the OU partners have gained a clearer understanding on the need to focus on ensuring sustainability of technological innovation (see section 6). Both Gooch and Price have developed a broader understanding of the methods they can recommend during PhD supervision, ensuring that the next generation of researchers within HCI, digital healthcare and Computer Science more broadly, have opportunities to develop expertise and experience of utilising citizen science methods when addressing research challenges. There is also a clear recognition that both OU and CAMK would benefit from further developing their practice regarding the co-development of research questions with citizens. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2020 |
| Sector | Communities and Social Services/Policy |
| Description | SERVICE: Social and Emotional Resilience for the Vulnerable Impacted by the COVID-19 Emergency |
| Amount | £400,243 (GBP) |
| Funding ID | EP/V027263/1 |
| Organisation | Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) |
| Sector | Public |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Start | 08/2020 |
| End | 01/2022 |
| Description | Community Action MK |
| Organisation | Community Action MK |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Sector | Charity/Non Profit |
| PI Contribution | Joint development all project activities |
| Collaborator Contribution | Expertise from community engagement work, and joint development of all project activities |
| Impact | See the other sections on this researchfish entry. |
| Start Year | 2015 |