Studies show that complementing text with pictures can increase the comprehension and recall of the information contained in the text. In the specific domain of health care, research has also shown that adding illustrations to patient instructions can significantly increase comprehension, recall, and adherence. However, creating pictures to illustrate materials for patients is a time consuming activity that requires solid drawing skills that most medical teams lack. We propose to create an online library of health-related pictures to be populated using a participatory design model in which the efforts and contributions of health care providers and consumers alike will be used to create, assess, and revise pictures, which will be freely available for clinical teams to use in patient education materials. Participatory design is an approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders in the design process in order to help ensure the product meets their needs and is usable. More than a simple participatory design approach, this project will also be based on a crowdsourcing model, which is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call. All interested individuals will be fre to contribute as much as they desire. The combination of participatory design and crowdsourcing approaches will enable the library to grow and correct itself without a central authority. This approach has been successfully adopted by sites like Wikipedia. Because members of the intended audiences are allowed active participation the entire process, the pictures are much more likely to be better understood by them and trigger the intended response. The number of pictures as well as their quality will continually grow as this is an interactive system. Participants can always make improvements or alternatives to any picture in the library, at any time. The ultimate goal of this project is to have a positive impact on clinical practice by facilitating and enhancing communication between clinical teams and patients. As the picture library expands, an increasingly broad range of educational materials will benefit from it, including informed consent forms.
We propose to create an online library of health-related pictures to be populated using a participatory design model in which the efforts and contributions of health care providers and consumers alike will be used to create, assess, and revise pictures, which will be freely available for clinical teams to use in patient education materials. Participatory design is an approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders in the design process in order to help ensure the product meets their needs and is usable. More than a simple participatory design approach, this project will also be based on a crowdsourcing model, which is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call. All interested individuals will be free to contribute as much as they desire. The combination of participatory design and crowdsourcing approaches will enable the library to grow and correct itself without a central authority. Because members of the intended audiences are allowed active participation the entire process, the pictures are much more likely to be better understood by them and trigger the intended response. The number of pictures as well as their quality will continually grow as this is an interactive system. Participants can always make improvements or alternatives to any picture in the library, at any time. The ultimate goal of this project is to have a positive impact on clinical practice by facilitating and enhancing communication between clinical teams and patients. As the picture library expands, an increasingly broad range of educational materials will benefit from it, including informed consent forms.
| Christensen, Carrie; Redd, Doug; Lake, Erica et al. (2017) Doodle Health: A Crowdsourcing Game for the Co-design and Testing of Pictographs to Reduce Disparities in Healthcare Communication. AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2017:585-594 |
| Kuang, Jinqiu; Argo, Lauren; Stoddard, Greg et al. (2015) Assessing Pictograph Recognition: A Comparison of Crowdsourcing and Traditional Survey Approaches. J Med Internet Res 17:e281 |
