Writing a project proposal
Title: Impact of SMS health services on information needs, use and seeking behavior
intermediate health outcome perception, adoption of the technology and their information
seeking behavior: diffusion of innovation perspective (from a relative advantage
perspective)
SMS: User perception of the service in intermediate health outcomes and information
behavior
How did this affect your health outcomes and would you want to use it in other areas,
particularly information needs: attitudes and perceptions related to the adoption
(motivation, self-efficacy, …. Information seeking behavior)
User perception of sms health services impact on intermediate health outcomes and
information behavior
User perceptions of intermediate health outcomes and information behavior impact from
the adoption of SMS eHealth services
Working title: The perception of SMS eHealth/health interventions by early adopters on
intermediate health outcomes and information behaviour impact
User perceptions of intermediate health outcomes and the information behavior impact of
SMS eHealth services
Look at who what, where ….
Meng
Introduction to the topic
What is the situation? Briefly define the technology and the newness of the field.
Few studies have looked at … (from an information science perspective)
Problem statement
Brief definition of field (diffusion of innovation)
Few studies have looked at ….
Research questions
The study will explore ….
The main question to be answered will
Some sub-questions related to the field:
Significance of the study
The study will give more understanding …
Will contribute to work/research in (development), practice, theory
SMS for healthcare delivery. What is SMS?
Introduction
eHealth is … (see article)
eHealth is a promising field in medicine. The ability to ___ (give definition here)
“eHealth is emerging as a promising vehicle to address the limited capacity of the health
care system to provide health behavior change and chronic disease management
interventions.” Ahern et al., 2006
“eHealth is defined as the use of emerging interactive technologies (e.g., Internet, CDROMs, personal digital assistants, interactive television and voice response systems,
computer kiosks, and mobile computing) to enable health improvement and health care
services” Ahern et al. quoting Eng 2001 (see original for reference)
An especially facinating element is mobile phones. Communication may occur by voice,
by text through text messaging service and by image. In addition, its realtive
ubiqtiousness makes it a handy portable computer that many people have (find statistics
here)
Computer based approaches for health communication can expand access to reach
millions of people in real time; enhance active learning; increase skills, motivation and
self-efficacy to perform a task or behavior; and provide an environment for shared
decision making (Suggs, 2006)
Applying new technologies for health communication has great potential: cost-effective,
tailored to individual patients, and help achieve positive health outcomes, expand access
to services (Suggs, 2006).
There is a need to look at … in eHealth (look at NHS article)
Research needs in the arena
Many of the recommendations confirmed the need to identify best practice and the
barriers to implementation of that best practice (NHS, Jones et al., 2005)
NHS study had a document that looked at overall research priorities in eHealth had six
categories: principles of research and development, stakeholder hierarchy; the remaining
4 fall under the scope of new research in eHealth: which looks at using, controlling,
processing, sharing information. Clearly there is a need to look at things from an
information perspective
What is the content communicated since SMS and picture messaging means: since there
is very little text exchanged and image quality may not be strong: these limitations due to
financial constraints, or technological limits  this is an information problem (look up
Donald Case to see what exactly)
Adoption of this process (Wired for Health and Well-Being: The Emergence of
Interactive Health Communication; government document, 1999)
My research purpose
While ICT (information and communication technology) changes are rapid, research
should focus on human behavior and and how we use information as related to the
characteristics of the technology rather than the specific details, and less about specific
organizational or technological environments (Jones et al., 2005)
Look at it from an information science lens, (in the sense that I’ll be focusing on the
information provided and information exchange, and satisfying of information needs, as
one of the key factors to adopting the technology).
I want to look at the patients’ perceptions of the benefits and barriers to using ICT (Jones
et al., 2005)
Few studies have looked at the use of this from an information science perspective. To
look at how it affects peoples perceptions of their health outcomes. This is important
because you want to see whether people will adopt this technology. Figuring out what
they like about it and what they don’t is helpful to design, so that it may reach its
potential in facilitating healthcare interventiosn and access. Subsequently the impact on
health information behaviour is an interesting point to study. Getting the correct
information may improve health promotion and disease prevention (people have the
correct information to learn and facilitate behavior change), and can facilitate improved
patient participation in health care interventions
Want to study it from a diffusion of innovations perspective
My research question
My sub questions (that I would survey on)
Significance of study
Research studies have looked at the potential of health communication technology. In
order to integrate you need to: tailoring communication content, the channel used to
delvier the message, and evaluation models that are best suited for examining outcomes
(Suggs, 2006)  in order to address these issues, you need to look at how people see the
impact of the technology on health outcomes (do they see an advantage so that they will
use it), and you need to see what kind of information needs and behavior the technology
elicit so that the technology can meet these needs; by looking at perceptions you can
identify criteria for satisfaction to base development of evaluative tools
To do:
I’m interested in cell phone eHealth: define eHealth, and includes SMS and picture
messaging
Summarize the research issues in the eHealth article/NHS
Extract useful information from my original dissertation proposal