Ida Löscher

EIT Health/ACM SIGCHI eHealth Summer School 2017, week 1 in Dublin

The EIT Health/SIGCHI eHealth summer school was last week in Dublin. A summer school is a great opportunity for PhD students and other researchers to learn more about a subject and to get connected to other people with a similar interest. This summer school was about HCI and eHealth, and therefore a whole bunch from us participated, more exactly Christiane, Diane, Jonas, Åsa and me! (or Åsa is one of the organizers). The summer school will continue with one more week in the end of August, and that time in Stockholm and Uppsala!

The Dublin week of the summer school was very well organized by Gavin Doherty from Trinity College Dublin. The participants were a good mix between innovators and eHealth researchers from different related disciplines such as HCI, Technology, Health Sciences and Psychology, and also patients participated! We got to hear many good talks during the week, and had hands on exercises and group work. The talks covered for example patient and public involvement, user centered design, how to use fiction in the design process, designing for behavior change, inclusive design, internet interventions, ethics in eHealth, and some very interesting case studies! Geraldine Fitzpatrick from TU Wien gave a lecture called “Putting eHealth in context” and mentioned that instead of designing “smart” systems, we should focus on systems that enable people to make their own decisions.

During a inspiring lecture by Madeline Balaam (OpenLab, University of Newcastle) about design ideation we got to do a short workshop to generate design solutions for eHealth related to different technologies, contexts, users, and health conditions.

The picture is from Madeline Balaam’s lecture about user centred design, and the development of the app FeedFinder, which is an app for finding good breastfeeding locations!

Ann Blandford from University College London gave a lecture about medical device safety. One of the important things she said was to design for resilience by “empowering people to be creative within the bounds of understood safety practices”.

You can read more about the summer school in Jonas’ blog (day 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), in Åsa’s blog, and in Diane’s blog (here, and here)! The week in Dublin was great and now I am really looking forward to the second week of the summer school in Stockholm and Uppsala!

MedTech Science & Innovation

Wednesday last week, and as a beginning of the Swedish MedTech week 2017, was the inauguration of MedTech Science & Innovation which is a new medical research and innovation centre in Uppsala. The centre is a long term collaboration between the Uppsala University Hospital and Uppsala University.

The day started with a welcome from Fredrik Nikolajeff and Marika Edoff from MedTech Science & Innovation. It was a busy schedule with many good presentations. Magnus Larsson, the head of the Digital Development Unit at the Uppsala University Hospital, talked about the digitalization within healthcare. Anna Attefall from Innovation Akademiska talked about how they support innovations, and she stressed the importance of user tests!

Further the program included many short presentations from researchers working with a broad range of MedTech applications. One example is Robin Strand from CBA and the division of Visual Information and Interaction at the IT department at Uppsala University (same division as the HTO group) who presented their work with advanced image analysis as a support for surgery. I was last out among the research presentations and talked about how important it is that the MedTech systems are usable, and how we work with including the user perspective.

The event ended with industry presentations, with for example Carl Bennet from the Getinge Group who stressed the importance to measure other values than costs to stimulate new innovations for better healthcare.

Listen to the presentations (in Swedish) here

DISA Kick-off

We had an exciting two day Kick-off meeting with the DISA-project in beautiful Sigtuna on Thursday and Friday last week. The first day the project team focused on getting to know each other, and to talk about what is done so far and future plans. Minna Salminen-Karlsson gave us insight of what a gender perspective of the project can be and we had a discussion about the PhD students work and how our interests fit into the project. After long and giving discussions we manage to get out just before sunset for our own organized city tour. We visited the historical sites of Sigtuna and took turns conveying its interesting history.

The DISA project has a reference group who was invited for the second day of the kick-off. This day started off with a speed-mingle, which is a form of team building exercise including questions like “how do you explain what you are working with to your friends and family?”. It was a great and fun way to get to know each other.

The day continued with a presentation about the overall goals and objectives of the DISA project by Åsa Cajander. Christiane Grünloh, Diane Golay and I also presented the three project tracks, Oncology, Surgical care, and Children’s care. The last hours of the day was spent on a workshop where we, together with the reference group, brainstormed about the effects of digitalization on the work environment of nurses. The workshop lead to interesting discussions, and it was a good opportunity to learn from the reference groups experiences from health care and from previous research.

The Kick-off was very well organized by Gerolf Nauwerck and it seemed like all participants were satisfied after the intense days! I had a great time and feel excited to work with the DISA-project and of course together with this group. I especially enjoyed the openness of the discussions and how everyone contributed with their own perspective and expertise.