Mobile applications, wearables, in-home medical devices and other peripherals are reshaping consumer participation in healthcare. While much research has focused on patient facing mobile technologies, there remains limited evidence of the implications of technologies on models of care and health service delivery. In this paper, we present an evaluation of the clinician experiences of using a bidirectional healthcare platform, Activate TKR, for orthopaedic patients undergoing a Total Knee Replacement (TKR). The platform provides mobile-enabled media rich content to support patients through their journey, while facilitating data sharing and remote monitoring by clinicians. Results show that physiotherapists experienced the greatest enhancements in care delivery through access to patient generated information which improved appointments, status and progress discussion, and tailoring of physiotherapy. Surgeons found value in the mobile-enabled information patients accessed in preparation for surgery, enhancing their overall TKR experience.

This paper presents our work in the design and development of collaborative platforms to support distributed scientific collaborations in a national biosecurity laboratory which carries out diagnostics and research work in animal diseases. We have focused on two types of collaboration challenges. One is the “distributed” collaborations between scientists working inside the physical containment areas and scientists working in the general office area within the laboratory. The second is the collaborative diagnosis and decision-making work between this laboratory and other organizations working on the responses of emergency animal diseases. The “biosecurity collaboration platform” which addresses the first challenge has been implemented and used by the scientists in the laboratory. The platform integrates shared digital workspaces and supports the sharing and interaction of scientific data from various resources and laboratory instruments (e.g. microscopes). The “secure collaboration platform” which addresses the second challenge is an extension of the biosecurity collaboration platform and integrates eAuthentication and eAuthorization technologies to support secure communication and information sharing between experts from different organizations. Results from user studies have shown that the collaboration platforms can provide core capabilities of communication, trustworthy information sharing and access to real-time data from scientific instruments in complex collaborations in the biosecurity domain.

Establishing secure collaborations between multiple organisations, potentially who are in competitors, requires substantial careful attention to how information is exchanged during the collaboration, from the formulation of policies and agreements between the organisations that govern the collaboration at the most abstract level, through to authentication and authorisation services and down to secure network and storage infrastructure. This paper presents a high level description of the secure integrated collaboration platform for distributed groups that has been developed and deployed as a part of a pilot for the AU2EU project. This secure platform utilises advanced eAuthentication and eAuthorisation services integrated into an advanced real-time collaborative system offering high definition telepresence combined with a secure common shared workspace that gives capability based collaborative access to specialised instruments, data sets and images.

Mobile-based collaboration tools are increasingly used for communication and information sharing in delivering healthcare services that need collaboration across different geographical locations. Some of the typical features found in the collaboration tools include video conferencing facility, image

In this paper, we present an interaction technique that supports the use of tablet devices for interaction and collaboration with large displays. Users can interact with a subset of the large workspace on their tablet, while the same area is visualized on the large display as a rectangular frame. We propose an efficient management and navigation interface through the use of an interactive world-in-miniature view and multitouch gestures. Users can intuitively manage their views on their tablets, navigate between different areas of the workspace, or enlarge them for a closer look. Additionally, they can quickly jump to the same view that their collaborators are looking at.

This paper reports the findings from a field study of distributed scientific collaboration within a national animal health laboratory. Collaboration in this setting is challenged by the need for biosecurity - there are physical containment barriers between scientists and work groups and movement of people and other physical objects across the barriers requires extensive security procedures. The aim of the field study was to understand how the scientists communicate across the barriers, particularly how they share information and collaborate on its analysis. The findings reveal that the collaboration issues relate not just to the challenges caused by the containment barriers but also to the need for collaboration support between the scientists and their work groups irrespective of the barriers. The paper explains how these findings informed the design of the collaboration platform being installed and how more generic requirements of supporting collaboration over distance were configured and extended to meet the specific requirements of a very particular local setting.

We present the design and implementation of an advanced collaboration platform that integrates life-size video conferencing and group interactions with a large shared workspace. The platform was developed to support the diagnostics and research scientists who need to work collaboratively with others

We conducted field studies with three multi-disciplinary cancer teams at three hospitals. We investigated distributed multi-disciplinary team meetings (MDTMs) at each setting focusing on the organisational context, existing collaboration technology facilities and the use and availability of digital medical information systems. Our results highlight how factors such as room size, team size, seating arrangements, display configuration and variations in preparing and presenting medical information clearly influence the dynamics of the conversation and information sharing in distributed MDTMs. Our analysis shows how these configurations, arrangements and practices arise and the implications they have for any technical interventions that might be introduced. We discuss how to configure a collaborative work space to support information sharing and communication in distributed MDTMs, such as a shared physical space facilitating interaction, a shared information space affording varied styles of medical information interaction and, importantly, configuring available technologies and resources to support collaboration in shared spaces without compromising local contexts.

Query abandonment by search engine users is generally considered to be a negative signal. In this paper, we explore the concept of good abandonment. We define a good abandonment as an abandoned query for which the user's information need was successfully addressed by the search results page, with no need to click on a result or refine the query. We present an analysis of abandoned internet search queries across two modalities (PC and mobile) in three locales. The goal is to approximate the prevalence of good abandonment, and to identify types of information needs that may lead to good abandonment, across different locales and modalities. Our study has three key findings: First, queries potentially indicating good abandonment make up a significant portion of all abandoned queries. Second, the good abandonment rate from mobile search is significantly higher than that from PC search, across all locales tested. Third, classified by type of information need, the major classes of good abandonment vary dramatically by both locale and modality. Our findings imply that it is a mistake to uniformly consider query abandonment as a negative signal. Further, there is a potential opportunity for search engines to drive additional good abandonment, especially for mobile search users, by improving search features and result snippets.

This paper describes an initiative for exploring the design space of an enhanced collaboration platform for a multidisciplinary breast cancer team meeting distributed between two hospitals. We present our socio-technical approach to the system design process which is intended to encourage engagement between the research technologists and the clinicians without adversely affecting the work of the clinicians. We report on some initial results of the observational study performed by the Braccetto research team and current social-technical issues affecting communication between the multidisciplinary team members during the meetings. We highlight some technical and research challenges which include the role that medical images play as "boundary objects" for several disciplines in the meeting, the awareness requirement and the evaluation of collaboration effectiveness.