Colloquia Archive
Improving Behavioral Stages and Treatment Compliance in Children by Interactive Applications
April 15, 2008
Abstract:
Maintaining positive behaviors in chronic diseases is a challenging area in medicine. Although clinical treatments are necessary to improve chronic conditions, medical interventions alone are not sufficient. Chronic diseases need patient centered self management. Therefore, transferring customized information and knowledge to patients is crucial to empower them for the long term management of chronic disease. Interactive and attractive education systems are more effective in improving the "stages of changes" in patients by challenging them to adopt new strategies tailored for their unique profile.
My research studies the effect of interactive systems in improving patients' behavior toward their disease and educating them in order to empower the self management process for their disease and consequently increasing treatment compliance. Adaptive systems "learn" from the patient's situation based on their medical records and personal profiles and then the systems adapt themselves to the new situation and create new strategies to educate the patient to reinforce positive behavior. The effect of the proposed solution on children with IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease) has produced significant results. Currently diabetic children are undergoing a similar research and promising results are being acquired. Children with asthma are planned next.
Biography:Hadi Kharrazi is an Interdisciplinary Medical Informatics Ph.D. Candidate at the faculty of Computer Sciences and the faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University, Canada. He is a physician and holds a Masters in Health Informatics. He has been an honorary fellow of CHPSTP (Canadian Health Informatics PhD/Postdoc Strategic Training Program) and has won several awards including the prestigious NSHRF and CIHR doctoral awards. He believes that bridging the gap between medicine and computer sciences requires research in different areas and, therefore, flexibility in research is an essential characteristic of a medical informatics researcher. His research interests include patient empowerment and behavioral changes in patients by interactive systems, patient centered decision support systems, human-computer interaction in medicine and web-based personalized patient health records.
