Gonzalo Parra*, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Marco Kalz*, Open University of the Netherlands, Heerlen, Netherlands Joris Klerkx, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Erik Duval, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Web 2.0 approaches for behaviour change, public health and biosurveillance Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Mermaid Room: Room 1 - Newgate Date: 2013-09-23 02:00 PM – 03:30 PM Last modified: 2013-09-25

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In order to increase awareness regarding current health related problems and opportunities for improvement, local-level health information has been considered as an effective way to reach and support different health community stakeholders. However, technical and institutional barriers limit the availability and use of such data, in addition to privacy concerns related to sharing this information.
We aim to grow public awareness of the need to know about the cardiac arrest problem in the Euregio Meuse-Rhine (EMR). Our objective is three-fold: (i) increasing citizens’ knowledge about cardiopulmonary resuscitation, (ii) reducing their fear to act in case they are by-standing a cardiac arrest, and (iii) recruiting volunteers who can be contacted in case of a cardiac arrest in their neighborhood. Doing so, we strongly believe that we can reduce time between a cardiac arrest and the start of bystander resuscitation before arrival of professional help, and therefore increase survival rates in our region. We have implemented an online aggregator application to grow public awareness that collects local-level health information from different sources. On top of that, we provide mechanisms to consume, localize, and personalize these information streams for different presentation outlets like mobile applications, social networks, web sites, and public displays. With this approach, we want to evaluate how and to which extent local-level information can be embedded in these different presentation outlets in order to increase public awareness of the cardiac arrest problem.
Under the framework of the EMuRgency Project (http://emurgency.eu/), a web application called the “EMuRgency Activity Stream” has been created based on so-called “Social Awareness Streams”. This type of systems enables people to share thoughts, activities, and information with different types of contacts. These information streams are consumed in different ways. For example, you can observe these streams as either stand-alone feed (e.g., Twitter), or embedded into other system (e.g., the Facebook News Feed). Our platform allows capturing relevant local-level health information on the one hand and activities of our volunteers on the other hand. Furthermore, it provides the means to embed these information feeds in various applications. For example, when a training course is scheduled and shared through the EMuRgency AS system, the details are automatically disseminated to (i) the EMuRgency Volunteer Notification System (VNS), (ii) the public displays of the project network, and (iii) the project’s news feed.
Currently, the EMuRgency AS disseminates information about cardiac arrest cases, training-courses, upcoming events such as the Medicine2.0 congress, automatic external defibrillator (AED) locations, and relevant text and video resources that aim to increase citizens’ knowledge about resuscitation. Regarding presentation outlets, the VNS client incorporates the activity stream in order to share the latest activities around the project with the registered volunteers. On a later stage, these information sources will be post-processed and different visualizations will be created using the aggregated data.
In the coming months we will run a pilot study to draw some conclusions of this approach based on the feedback obtained from different software components of the project that consume the information provided by the activity stream.