Dementia caregivers widely turn to social media for much needed information and support. Prior research on caregivers’ online information exchange has focused on the original questions or posts, without including peer comments in response to those original questions, which does not provide a complete picture of online information exchanges between caregivers and their peers. This paper provides a preliminary analysis of a subset of data from a larger project and suggests how peer comments might match with evidence-based care strategies for memory loss and confusion. A total of 954 peer comments on 114 Reddit posts for dementia memory loss and confusion were collected and mapped with 5 evidence-based strategies generated from 17 care strategies from 3 credible websites. Our results report how well peer comments on Reddit can map to existing evidence-based strategies, and provide preliminary evidence supporting the necessity of providing tailored information based on the patient’s characteristics, stages of disease, and the progression level of memory loss and confusion.

Abstract Understanding the factors that influence trust in public health information is critical for designing successful public health campaigns during pandemics such as COVID‐19. We present findings from a cross‐sectional survey of 454 US adults—243 older (65+) and 211 younger (18–64) adults—who responded to questionnaires on human values, trust in COVID‐19 information sources, attention to information quality, self‐efficacy, and factual knowledge about COVID‐19. Path analysis showed that trust in direct personal contacts (B = 0.071, p = .04) and attention to information quality (B = 0.251, p < .001) were positively related to self‐efficacy for coping with COVID‐19. The human value of self‐transcendence, which emphasizes valuing others as equals and being concerned with their welfare, had significant positive indirect effects on self‐efficacy in coping with COVID‐19 (mediated by attention to information quality; effect = 0.049, 95% CI 0.001–0.104) and factual knowledge about COVID‐19 (also mediated by attention to information quality; effect = 0.037, 95% CI 0.003–0.089). Our path model offers guidance for fine‐tuning strategies for effective public health messaging and serves as a basis for further research to better understand the societal impact of COVID‐19 and other public health crises.

We present an empirical study into the visual content people who are blind consider to be private. We conduct a two-stage interview with 18 participants that identifies what they deem private in general and with respect to their use of services that describe their visual surroundings based on camera feeds from their personal devices. We then describe a taxonomy of private visual content that is reflective of our participants’ privacy-related concerns and values. We discuss how this taxonomy can benefit services that collect and sell visual data containing private information so such services are better aligned with their users.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) poses serious challenges for both patients and their family caregivers. In this paper we present the design, development, and evaluation of an ontology model, ADCareOnto, to assist family caregivers providing personalized care for persons living with AD. ADCareOnto includes top-level categories, concepts, and relations about informal care for persons with AD. To enable personalization in care, ADCareOnto also includes a comprehensive user profile modeling that includes various characteristics of both AD patients and caregivers. AD care thus can be tailored based on the user's unique concerns, preferences, and needs. We verified and validated the design of ADCareOnto and evaluated it using a real use case. The results support the quality of its content and techniques.

Abstract In this opinion paper, we argue that global health crises are also information crises. Using as an example the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) epidemic, we (a) examine challenges associated with what we term “global information crises”; (b) recommend changes needed for the field of information science to play a leading role in such crises; and (c) propose actionable items for short‐ and long‐term research, education, and practice in information science.

OBJECTIVE: This study focused on patient portal use and investigated whether aesthetic evaluations of patient portals function are antecedent variables to variables in the Technology Acceptance Model. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey of current patient portals users (N = 333) was conducted online. Participants completed the Visual Aesthetics of Website Inventory, along with items measuring perceived ease of use (PEU), perceived usefulness (PU), and behavioral intentions (BIs) to use the patient portal. RESULTS: The hypothesized model accounted for 29% of the variance in BIs to use the portal, 46% of the variance in the PU of the portal, and 29% of the variance in the portal's PEU. Additionally, one dimension of the aesthetic evaluations functions as a predictor in the model - simplicity evaluations had a significant positive effect on PEU. CONCLUSION: This study provides evidence that aesthetic evaluations - specifically regarding simplicity - function as a significant antecedent variable to patients' use of patient portals and should influence patient portal design strategies.

The quality of online health information for consumers has been a critical issue that concerns all stakeholders in healthcare. To gain an understanding of how quality is evaluated, this systematic review examined 165 articles in which researchers evaluated the quality of consumer‐oriented health information on the web against predefined criteria. It was found that studies typically evaluated quality in relation to the substance and formality of content, as well as to the design of technological platforms. Attention to design, particularly interactivity, privacy, and social and cultural appropriateness is on the rise, which suggests the permeation of a user‐centered perspective into the evaluation of health information systems, and a growing recognition of the need to study these systems from a social‐technical perspective. Researchers used many preexisting instruments to facilitate evaluation of the formality of content; however, only a few were used in multiple studies, and their validity was questioned. The quality of content (i.e., accuracy and completeness) was always evaluated using proprietary instruments constructed based on medical guidelines or textbooks. The evaluation results revealed that the quality of health information varied across medical domains and across websites, and that the overall quality remained problematic. Future research is needed to examine the quality of user‐generated content and to explore opportunities offered by emerging new media that can facilitate the consumer evaluation of health information.

As new technologies emerge that can bring older adults together with children, little has been discussed by researchers concerning the design methods used to create these new technologies. Giving both children and older adults a voice in a shared design process comes with many challenges. This paper details an exploratory study focusing on connecting generations through cooperative design (co-design) methods that can enable idea construction and elaboration to flourish. Design techniques were adapted that ranged from low-tech prototyping and sticky-note feedback to distributed collaboration. The critical finding in this research was that children and older adults need not only time together to start the collaboration but also time apart to further the collaboration at a distance. This case study research reports on how our methods evolved and how others can apply these methods for their own work.

Contextual help is effective for learning how to use GUIs by showing instructions and highlights on the actual interface rather than in a separate viewer. However, end-users and third-party tech support typically cannot create contextual help to assist other users because it requires programming skill and source code access. We present a creation tool for contextual help that allows users to apply common computer skills-taking screenshots and writing simple scripts. We perform pixel analysis on screenshots to make this tool applicable to a wide range of applications and platforms without source code access. We evaluated the tool's usability with three groups of participants: developers, in-structors, and tech support. We further validated the applicability of our tool with 60 real tasks supported by the tech support of a university campus.

The theory-driven Electronic Health Information for Life-Long Learners via Collaborative Learning (eHILLL-CL) intervention, developed and tested in public libraries, aims to improve older adults' e-health literacy. A total of 172 older adults participated in this study from August 2009 to June 2010. Significant differences were found from pretest to posttest in general computer/Web knowledge and skill gains and in e-health literacy (p<0.001 in all cases; effect sizes: 0.5–2.1; statistical power: 1.00 even at the 0.01 level) and three attitude measures (p<0.05) for both computer anxiety and attitudes toward the aging experience in physical change, and p<0.01 for attitude toward the CL method; effect sizes: 0.2–0.3; statistical power: 0.4–0.8, at the 0.05 level). No significant difference was found in other variables. Participants were highly positive about the intervention and reported positive changes in health-related behavior and decision making. Group composition (based on gender, prior familiarity with peers, or prior computer experience) showed no significant impact on CL outcomes. These findings contribute to the CL and health literacy literatures and infer that CL can be a useful method for improving older adults' e-health literacy when using the specific strategies developed for this study, which suggests that social interdependence theory can be generalized beyond the younger population and formal educational settings.

A theory-driven, older adult-oriented e-health literacy intervention was developed and tested to generate scientific knowledge about the potential impact of learning methods and information presentation channels. The experimental design was a 2 × 2 × 2 mixed factorial design with learning method (collaborative, individualistic) and presentation channel (visual only, visual plus auditory) as the between-subjects variables and time of measurement (pre-, post-) as the within-subjects variable. One hundred twenty-four older adults (age: M = 68.15, SD = 9.00) participated during September 2010–February 2011. No significant interaction or main effect of learning method and information presentation channel was found, suggesting the advantages of collaborative learning over individualistic learning or the redundancy effect might not be easily generalized to older adults in similar experimental conditions. Time of measurement had significant main effects on e-health literacy efficacy, perceived usefulness of e-health literacy skills, and e-health literacy skills (p <.001 in all three cases; power = 1.00 or .98). These findings suggest that the intervention, regardless of its specific combination of learning method and information presentation channel, was effective in improving e-health literacy from pre- to postintervention. The findings contribute to the collaborative learning, multimedia learning, and e-health literacy literatures.