Information Studies Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2780
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Item CONTRADICTIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES IN MOBILE CARE MANAGEMENT (“mCare”): AN OBSERVATIONAL ANALYTIC COHORT STUDY(2019) Crowley, Patrick Kenyon; St. Jean, Beth; Butler, Brian; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Chronic diseases such as diabetes are among the most widespread, expensive, and preventable of all health problems, accounting for approximately 86 percent of the United States’ $2.7 trillion annual health care expenditures. In the face of such staggering numbers, it is surprising that our current approach to chronic disease care management has remained largely unchanged for decades, where the care team evaluates the patient and related data infrequently and episodically. However, mobile care management (mCare) information system use is growing, whereby individuals with chronic medical conditions such as diabetes are taught to monitor and manage their disease through the use of a mobile application for tracking, education and feedback, along with monitoring of vital signs with “connected” medical devices, and the support of a remote health coach. These mCare systems offer promise, but many unanswered questions exist surrounding their effects on the health and healthcare of the users, and how user individual differences may influence these effects. Informed primarily by the mobile health systems and health behavior literatures, this study provided a deeper understanding of the effects of an mCare platform on health outcomes and health services utilization of chronic disease patients, principally those with diabetes mellitus, and the effects of a user’s social support on these outcomes. This study analyzed administrative claims, device readings, app usage, demographic and social determinant data of 163 diabetic mCare users from a 21-week observation period from mCare initiation, along with a well-matched control group of diabetic non-users, and a supplemental cohort of 127 non-diabetic mCare users with other chronic medical conditions. mCare had a significant positive effect on users’ adherence to physician’s office visits, suggesting greater continuity of care, chronic care management, and a possible reduction in inpatient use (1.2 fewer encounters over 5 months, on average). The findings show that mCare had a significant beneficial effect, on average, towards the cardiovascular health of the users as measured by the change in their diastolic blood pressure (- 2.8 mmHg, - 3.3%) and systolic blood pressure (- 6.7 mmHg, - 4.9%) in the five-month observational period, which is a primary therapeutic target for diabetes care and clinically important. Furthermore, linear mixed models of cardiovascular outcomes uncovered how those mCare users with a moderate degree of social support are likely to achieve greater benefit in from mCare on average relative to those with very high or very low social support in their lives. This additional impact equated to on average a 2.4 mmHg drop (2.9%) in diastolic blood pressure and a 3.9 mmHg (3.1%) drop in systolic blood pressure over the five-month observational period, which is clinically significant. These results provide evidence to support a more precisely tailored future healthcare paradigm beyond the current one-size-fits-all archetype. A primary goal of mCare is triaging emergency department use where appropriate; however, this study found that this did not happen in a significant manner in the treatment group compared to the control group. Furthermore, the study identified specific medical problems where improved mCare design is needed, including processes to prevent hyperglycemia, hypoglycemia and exacerbations of hypertension and pulmonary issues (such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), and a need to assess pain more effectively to foster more appropriate healthcare utilization. Additional training for health coaches, as well as training and development of machine intelligence algorithms to better triage patient problems to appropriate sites of care, are productive directions for future research. mCare designers should seek to better gauge the severity of pain, and develop new sensor technologies to assess emergent issues, especially abdominal pain. mCare vendors should also seek to refine their processes to better manage glucose and respiratory issues to avoid exacerbations, and predict exacerbations earlier to intervene.Item SIMULATING REALITY: TRAINING CITIZEN SCIENTISTS TO JUDGE STREAM HABITATS IN MULTISENSORY VIRTUAL REALITY(2019) Striner, Alina Goldman; Preece, Jennifer; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Citizen science is a form of crowdsourcing that allows volunteers to participate in scientific data collection and analysis. Many citizen scientists are engaged and motivated by science-based learning and discovery, but high training costs and limited resources often result in volunteers participating in unskilled work, leading to boredom and disengagement. Advances in immersive virtual reality (VR) have created opportunities to recreate physical environments with minimal cost, making it possible to train citizen scientists to make qualitative experiential judgments usually reserved for domain experts. This research trains citizen scientists to assess outdoor stream habitats using StreamBED VR, a multisensory VR training platform. This research offers the following contributions: 1. A study of how expert and novice water monitors make qualitative assessments of outdoor stream habitats using an EPA qualitative protocol. The research found that experts develop intuitive judgments of quality, use multisensory environmental information to make judgments, and construct past and future narratives of streams using environmental characteristics. 2. Iterative design of the Ambient Holodeck multisensory system, and a study of how ambient sensory information impacts observation skills. The research found that multisensory information increased the number of observations participants made, and positively affected engagement and immersion. 3. Iterative design of the StreamBED VR training platform, and two studies; the former explores how qualitative assessment skills can be taught in VR, and the latter considers how training in VR, with and without Multisensory cues, compares to a PowerPoint (PPT) baseline. Study results found although VR participants were more excited to continue training than PPT participants, Standard VR and PPT participants scored closest to an expert gold standard, performing significantly better than Multisensory VR participants. This research concludes that VR has the potential to train qualitative assessment tasks, but qualifies that training design is multifaceted and complex, full of theoretical learning considerations and practical challenges. Further, VR realism can be a powerful tool for training, but is only effective when training cues clearly parallel assessment tasks.Item Designing Technology to Increase Adoption of Healthy Behaviors in Men in the Context of Light Food Consumption(2019) Smriti, Diva; Choe, Eun Kyoung; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Women are more likely than men to engage in healthy eating behaviors. However, men do strongly believe eating healthy, but this does not translate into their eating behaviors. Thus, there is a discrepancy in the health beliefs and behaviors of men, especially in the context of light food consumption. In this study, I aim to understand this discrepancy among young men in depth. I conducted a week-long diary study of the food items consumed by the participants (N = 17) who were all male, followed by semi-structured interviews. Findings indicate the lack of a verified and automated source of nutritional knowledge, misinformation about light food consumption among other themes, and design implications to the current nutrition-tracking mobile applications. This work contributes to the understudied existing literature on men’s food behaviors, the challenges faced by them in adopting healthy eating behaviors in the context of light food consumption, and the role mobile applications play in helping them do so.Item USER INTERFACE CHANGES IN VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS AFFECT THE PERCEIVED RESPONSES OF INDOOR CYCLISTS(2018) Stone, Rebecca; Golbeck, Jennifer A.; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Virtual reality is becoming mainstream in areas such as entertainment, medicine and training. However, the affect on a user’s perceived states are still to be fully understood. This study aims to add to the existing body of research by examining changes in user interfaces and the affect on perceived responses. Subjects in the study were exposed to two virtual environments, while undertaking a physical exercise task. Their perceived responses were captured through a combination of interviews, observations, and surveys. This differs from previous studies in that it is capturing the perceived differences between the environments themselves. The results highlighted that the content of the environments resulted in a variety of interesting, and unexpected, perceived responses.Item THE GROWTH OF INNOVATION COMMUNITIES: COMMUNITY ECOLOGY AND DYNAMIC STRUCTURES(2017) Meng, Xu; Butler, Brian; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)IT innovations are enabling transformational change in many aspects of the economy and society, and can dramatically transform the way people live and organizations operate. The success and development of IT innovations depends on sustained investment and yet IT innovations are subject to rapid changes, significant uncertainty, and high risk of failure. As some IT innovations, such as thin-clients and specialized business programming languages, disappear; others, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, become widely used. A lesson learned is that the development of successful IT innovations not only relies on inventing new technologies, but also on providing moderate deployment and sustained support. More importantly, the premise of developing successful IT innovations requires us to understand how, when, and in what context IT innovation occurs. Innovation communities and the participants within them are an important part of unpacking this complexity, as participants in the innovation communities constantly contributing to providing supports for developing IT innovations. Therefore, promoting and fostering successful IT innovations is dependent on the ability to support the development of IT innovation communities. Against this backdrop, using theories from sociology, information systems, and organizational studies, this dissertation focuses on two underexplored aspects of IT innovation community: ecology of IT innovation community and the dynamics of community structure. This dissertation fills a gap in prior research by applying organizational ecology theory to a mature IT innovation (CRM) at a community level, to explain the ecological evolution of an IT innovation and dynamic structural context of its associated community. Empirical studies were conducted to test hypotheses regarding ecological and network impacts. The study extends organizational ecology theory by considering the consequences of classic ecological forces (legitimation and competition) on multiple populations of organizations at a community level. Analysis of a longitudinal sample of 286 news articles from 1998 to 2007 suggests that the dynamics of the CRM innovation community are in part shaped by the entry rates of organizations participating as technology providers and adopters, and organizational entry rates are affected by ecological forces. Specifically, organizations' decision to participate in the CRM innovation community depended on two ecological forces: (1) legitimation of CRM attracted organizations to enter the CRM innovation community; (2) competition for resources deterred such entries. Additionally, this study tested the impact of dynamic community structure on organizations’ entry in an innovation community. To test if the network structure of the community was associated with a higher rate of entry by organizations participating as CRM technology providers, a network metric for community structure, scale-freeness, was added in classic density-dependence model. The results suggest that, beyond legitimation and competition, structure of the community that can utilize resources efficiently was linked to higher rate of entry by organizations participating in the CRM innovation community as technology providers. Overall, this dissertation brings organizational ecology theories of IT innovation from the population/industry level to the higher, community level where multiple populations/industries engage and adds additional insights to the repertoire of theories of IT innovation communities. In particular, this dissertation adds an organizational ecology explanation to understanding the evolution of IT innovation communities, recognizes the distinct populations and demonstrates their contributions to shaping the dynamics of innovation communities, and opens up new ways of thinking about how the network structure of the community interacts with organizations’ decision to enter the community, and affects the overall development of the IT innovation communities.Item DATA SHARING ACROSS RESEARCH AND PUBLIC COMMUNITIES(2016) He, Yurong; Preece, Jennifer; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)For several decades, the intensifying trend of researchers to believe that sharing research data is “good” has overshadowed the belief that sharing data is “bad.” However, sharing data is difficult even though an impressive effort has been made to solve data sharing issues within the research community, but relatively little is known about data sharing beyond the research community. This dissertation aims to address this gap by investigating how data are shared effectively across research and public communities. The practices of sharing data with both researchers and non-professionals in two comparative case studies, Encyclopedia of Life and CyberSEES, were examined by triangulating multiple qualitative data sources (i.e., artifacts, documentation, participant observation, and interviews). The two cases represent the creation of biodiversity data, the beginning of the data sharing process in a home repository, and the end of the data sharing process in an aggregator repository. Three research questions are asked in each case: • Who are the data providers? • Who are the data sharing mediators? • What are the data sharing processes? The findings reveal the data sharing contexts and processes across research and public communities. Data sharing contexts are reflected by the cross-level data providers and human mediators rooted in different groups, whereas data sharing processes are reflected by the dynamic and sustainable collaborative efforts made by different levels of human mediators with the support of technology mediators. This dissertation provides theoretical and practical contributions. Its findings refine and develop a new data sharing framework of knowledge infrastructure for different-level data sharing across different communities. Both human and technology infrastructure are made visible in the framework. The findings also provide insight for data sharing practitioners (i.e., data providers, data mediators, data managers, and data contributors) and information system developers and designers to better conduct and support open and sustainable data sharing across research and public communities.Item The role of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) in information and communication in science. A conceptual framework and empirical study(2016) Pikas, Christina Kirk; Soergel, Dagobert; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Problem This dissertation presents a literature-based framework for communication in science (with the elements partners, purposes, message, and channel), which it then applies in and amends through an empirical study of how geoscientists use two social computing technologies (SCTs), blogging and Twitter (both general use and tweeting from conferences). How are these technologies used and what value do scientists derive from them? Method The empirical part used a two-pronged qualitative study, using (1) purposive samples of ~400 blog posts and ~1000 tweets and (2) a purposive sample of 8 geoscientist interviews. Blog posts, tweets, and interviews were coded using the framework, adding new codes as needed. The results were aggregated into 8 geoscientist case studies, and general patterns were derived through cross-case analysis. Results A detailed picture of how geoscientists use blogs and twitter emerged, including a number of new functions not served by traditional channels. Some highlights: Geoscientists use SCTs for communication among themselves as well as with the public. Blogs serve persuasion and personal knowledge management; Twitter often amplifies the signal of traditional communications such as journal articles. Blogs include tutorials for peers, reviews of basic science concepts, and book reviews. Twitter includes links to readings, requests for assistance, and discussions of politics and religion. Twitter at conferences provides live coverage of sessions. Conclusions Both blogs and Twitter are routine parts of scientists' communication toolbox, blogs for in-depth, well-prepared essays, Twitter for faster and broader interactions. Both have important roles in supporting community building, mentoring, and learning and teaching. The Framework of Communication in Science was a useful tool in studying these two SCTs in this domain. The results should encourage science administrators to facilitate SCT use of scientists in their organization and information providers to search SCT documents as an important source of information.Item The Cost of Turning Heads - The Design and Evaluation of Vocabulary Prompts on a Head-Worn Display to Support Persons with Aphasia in Conversation(2015) Williams, Kristin; Findlater, Leah; Geography/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Symbol-based dictionaries could provide persons with aphasia a resource for finding needed words, but they can detract from conversation. This research explores the potential of head-worn displays (HWDs) to provide glanceable vocabulary support that is unobtrusive and always-available. Two formative studies explored the benefits and challenges of using a HWD, and evaluated a proof-of-concept prototype in both lab and field settings. These studies showed that a HWD may allow wearers to maintain focus on the conversation, reduce reliance on external support (e.g., paper and pen, or people), and minimize the visibility of support by others. A third study compared use of a HWD to a smartphone, and found preliminary evidence that the HWD may offer a better overall experience with assistive vocabulary and may better support the wearer in advancing through conversation. These studies should motivate further investigation of head-worn conversational support.Item Securing the Human – Exploring Current Security Awareness among Employees and Finding Ways to Improve it in the Organizational Setting(2015) Sebescen, Nina; Vitak, Jessica; Master in Information Management; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As organizational security breaches increase, it becomes imperative to understand the factors that lead to these breaches and take the necessary steps to minimize threats. Since employees are considered the weakest link in ensuring the security of corporate data, this paper evaluates various employee characteristics (demographic, company-specific, and skills-based) to understand their relationship with security knowledge and likelihood of becoming a security breach victim. This paper accounts for four different, yet intertwined, security risk areas: phishing, passwords, BYOD and laptop usage in the organizational setting. Findings from a survey of 250 employees at a medium-sized US consulting firm identify higher-risk employees and evaluate the relationship between employee characteristics, understanding of security policies, and security risks. Based on these findings and separate interviews with security experts, the study concludes with a set of recommendations for companies to improve organizational security and reduce risks caused by human factors in securing organizations’ endpoints.Item EXAMINATION OF THE MANAGEMENT OF SOCIAL MEDIA RECORDS AT A FEDERAL EXECUTIVE AGENCY(2015) Doran, Chad; Bertot, John; Kurtz, Michael; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Maintaining and preserving records has long been regarded as essential to the functioning of federal government and to related open government initiatives in particular. However, the literature identifies specific technology and policy-related challenges of managing social media records. While there exists in the literature a limited examination regarding the management of social media content in the federal agencies, a close analysis is needed to identify how social media records are being managed in practice. As the nature of social media and electronic content are both rapidly evolving, it is important to ensure that current practice guidelines are applicable to new technology and continually re-aligned to policy as requirements and regulations change. In recent years, effective management of social media records has become relevant not only in terms of ongoing compliance but as an essential element of open government and transparency-related initiatives. Additionally, and perhaps even more important, all records management and archive practices, including social media preservation, serve a larger social function of maintaining and documenting our collective memory and experiences. This study provides an in-depth analysis of social media records management within a federal executive agency, utilizing a mixed-methods approach consisting of website review, document review, and follow-up interviews. This study presents theoretical as well as practical implications. On the theoretical level, the study contributes to records management theory, application of information models, and the definition of the record in the social media environment. On the practical level, this research provides recommendations to industry and federal agencies for the development of standards, guidance, and technologies for the management and preservation of social media records.