A new form of healthcare Wikipedia for the neurotrauma community

Overview

Topic status: We're looking for students to study this topic.

Project Summary

Health care evidence is being produced at a rapidly growing rate. However methods to track and review it cannot keep up, leading to sub-optimal health-care policy and patient care. This project investigates ways to collaboratively produce a new high quality and authoritative source of up-to-date medical evidence.

The project involves the design of a medical/healthcare evidence review system/community which could be understood as a form of Wikipedia. The design of this resource will largely depend upon developing methods of attribution, review, verification and trust in order that medical and healthcare researchers and practitioners are willing to use such a system.

In order to understand the issues at hand, the project is grounded in a community of neurotrauma researchers and practitioners, who are active in reviewing the latest medical evidence and who need a system to better support and evolve their practices.  This community has been active in trialling a couple of existing prototypes. The project would begin by reviewing existing practices and prototypes as a basis for understanding how to design. 

The project offers a unique opportunity to work with a highly qualified and interested medical community and leading researchers in the field of Computer-Human Interaction.

Expected outcomes, applications and/or benefits

The project aims to develop

  • a working prototype system to collaboratively track and review the latest healthcare evidence trialled by a community of authors and readers in the neurotrauma community;
  • an understanding of participation incentives and barriers to uptake

Required student skills/experience

The student needs a background in Computer Science/ Information Technology/Engineering/Maths or Design, the ability to write clearly, and an interest/experience in web/ mobile development and ethnographic research.  An interest in learning human-centred research methods and human-computer interaction research approaches is needed. Please contact me if you would like to discuss further.

Study level
Vacation research experience scholarship
Supervisors
QUT External Prof Russ Gruen (Monash University, Alfred Health)
Organisational unit

Science and Engineering Faculty

Research area

Computer Science

Keywords
health care, computer-human interaction, wikipedia
Contact
Contact the supervisor for more information