Meghan goes to tobacco research conference
Our research scholar Meghan Bradway is invited to participate in an Oslo conference within a whole new field for her: Smoking cessation.
For e-health researcher Meghan, this represents something quite new. On September 12-14, she and her colleague Eirik Årsand will be in Oslo, taking part in the 19th Annual European conference for the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT-E).
(Conference link: https://web.cvent.com/event/00db6ff5-ffae-41eb-9c68-64d7cc114ef3/summary)
- How did you get involved in this – smoking and tobacco field?
- I was surprised and excited when we got the e-mail. It is a chance to look at our research in a different way. Some researchers had discovered my article on how to analyse diabetes patients’ app data. The symposium I will take part in is entitled “How do we design and evaluate digital smoking cessation interventions: methodological considerations, state of the research and recent findings.”
You can read Meghan's article here.
She says their studies on e-health and diabetes can be transferred to other fields in health care.
- For the symposium, we will describe methods for making and evaluating a system that allows patients to share their self-collected data from a diabetes diary app and sensors, with healthcare providers.
These methods emphasize the involvement of end-users, both patients and healthcare providers, throughout the design, development and testing phases of the system. At the conference, Meghan will show that the users must be involved in all phases - after all, they are the ones who will be using the technology!
Happy to share the knowledge
Her supervisor, Professor Eirik Årsand at E-health Research, will also go to the conference.
- It was a nice surprise to be contacted by conference committee members from Duke and Yale universities. It means much for our research team that our user involvement methods are noticed by these renowned research communities. And we are more than happy to share our knowledge for this important cause – smoking cessation.
Eirik says there is a trend within health technology, that users take more responsibility for their own health by using apps and mobile health technologies.
- We are not only interested in what happens before and after the clinical intervention, but also what participants choose to do along the way, says Eirik.
The teams research is funded by the Research Council of Norway.