Environmental Design for Communities to Expand the Social Interaction Paradigm: A Merger of Data, Technologies, and Theories
|
If you are the presenter of this abstract (or if you cite this abstract in a talk or on a poster), please show the QR code in your slide or poster (QR code contains this URL). |
Abstract
Background: The evolution of mobile technologies and online communities as the vehicles for health-related communication, decision-making, and dissemination has been astonishing. Several applications and products have been designed using these two technologies independently for improving and motivating positive changes in health. Yet, the adoption and use of such systems has been less than effective as expected. Possible causes for early technology abandonment may be caused by a failure to understand user needs in both the utilization of mobile technologies as well as maintenance of group behaviors necessary for promoting shared knowledge and goal support. This work attempts to develop a new kind of data-driven online community that is designed for use on mobile phones, thereby facilitating ecological momentary interventions in the context of social settings.
Objectives: 1) Develop a framework to facilitate the development of mobile platform based social communities that addresses user needs, 2) Incorporate features inspired by the lessons learned from data-driven analytics of social interactions in an existing community, and 3) Enhance the effectiveness of the social interactions by adopting theoretical concepts from distributed and group cognition.
Methods: We first described a novel framework to design the social interaction environment of mobile device online communities that draws upon theories underlying distributed and group cognition. As factors of distributed and group cognition, group roles, goals, shared awareness, and shared knowledge through the group communications, acts of coordination, and collaborations of online communities were analyzed. These factors were further categorized to determine helpful group behaviors and communications necessary for promoting positive health changes. In addition, the design framework was data-driven in nature and was guided by the lessons learned from content-inclusive social network analysis of an existing web-based community. Qualitative techniques, automated text analysis, and network analytics were used to derive meaningful patterns of communication underlying the behavioral change of the community users.
The resulting community framework will be aimed at supporting people attempting to a) change risky health behaviors such as substance abuse, and/or b) incorporate new lifestyle changes to improve overall health and wellness. The framework will be operationalized on mobile platforms. We will test the framework with a set of forty users in the aspects of user acceptance, user participation, and environment usefulness of the mobile device online community over a three month period of utilization and follow-up user survey.
Results: The work is still in progress, but we expect to create a novel community that builds on existing theories, data-driven reasoning, and user needs from our efforts. The resulting platform may enable higher user acceptance and an increase in technology adoption, thereby providing support for long-term sustenance and management of health-related changes.
Conclusions: We expect such a design philosophy will allow us to harness the power of social relationships by expanding on the traditional model of online interactions in online communities, thus enhancing their effectiveness in delivering socio-behavioral support for its users based on their real-time needs.
Objectives: 1) Develop a framework to facilitate the development of mobile platform based social communities that addresses user needs, 2) Incorporate features inspired by the lessons learned from data-driven analytics of social interactions in an existing community, and 3) Enhance the effectiveness of the social interactions by adopting theoretical concepts from distributed and group cognition.
Methods: We first described a novel framework to design the social interaction environment of mobile device online communities that draws upon theories underlying distributed and group cognition. As factors of distributed and group cognition, group roles, goals, shared awareness, and shared knowledge through the group communications, acts of coordination, and collaborations of online communities were analyzed. These factors were further categorized to determine helpful group behaviors and communications necessary for promoting positive health changes. In addition, the design framework was data-driven in nature and was guided by the lessons learned from content-inclusive social network analysis of an existing web-based community. Qualitative techniques, automated text analysis, and network analytics were used to derive meaningful patterns of communication underlying the behavioral change of the community users.
The resulting community framework will be aimed at supporting people attempting to a) change risky health behaviors such as substance abuse, and/or b) incorporate new lifestyle changes to improve overall health and wellness. The framework will be operationalized on mobile platforms. We will test the framework with a set of forty users in the aspects of user acceptance, user participation, and environment usefulness of the mobile device online community over a three month period of utilization and follow-up user survey.
Results: The work is still in progress, but we expect to create a novel community that builds on existing theories, data-driven reasoning, and user needs from our efforts. The resulting platform may enable higher user acceptance and an increase in technology adoption, thereby providing support for long-term sustenance and management of health-related changes.
Conclusions: We expect such a design philosophy will allow us to harness the power of social relationships by expanding on the traditional model of online interactions in online communities, thus enhancing their effectiveness in delivering socio-behavioral support for its users based on their real-time needs.
Medicine 2.0® is happy to support and promote other conferences and workshops in this area. Contact us to produce, disseminate and promote your conference or workshop under this label and in this event series. In addition, we are always looking for hosts of future World Congresses. Medicine 2.0® is a registered trademark of JMIR Publications Inc., the leading academic ehealth publisher.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.