The novel genre of pervasive games, which aim to create more fun and engaging experiences by promoting deeper immersion, could be a powerful strategy to stimulate physical activity among older adults. To use these games more effectively, it is necessary to understand how different design elements affect player behavior. The aim was to vary a specific design element of pervasive games for older adults, namely social interaction, to test the effect on levels of physical activity. Over 4 weeks, two variations of the same pervasive game were compared: social interaction for the test group and no social interaction for the control group. In both versions, players had to walk to physical locations and collect virtual cards, but the social interaction version allowed people to collaborate to obtain more cards. Weekly step counts were used to evaluate the effect on each group, and the number of places visited was used as an indicator of play activity. A total of 32 participants were recruited (no social interaction=15, social interaction=17); 18 remained until the end of the study (no social interaction=7, social interaction=11). Step counts during the first week were used as the baseline (no social interaction: mean 17,099.4, SE 3906.5; social interaction: mean 17,981.9, SE 2171.1). For the following weeks, changes to individual baseline were as follows for no social interaction (absolute/proportional): 383.8 (SE 563.8)/1.1% (SE 4.3%), 435.9 (SE 574.5)/2.2% (SE 4.6%), and -106.1 (SE 979.9)/-2.6% (SE 8.1%) for weeks 2, 3, and 4, respectively. For social interaction they were 3841.9 (SE 1425.4)/21.7% (SE 5.1%), 2270.6 (SE 947.1)/16.5% (SE 4.4%), and 2443.4 (SE 982.6)/17.9% (SE 4.7%) for weeks 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Analysis of group effect was significant (absolute change: η²=.19, P=.01; proportional change: η²=.27, P=.009). Correlation between the proportional change and the play activity was significant (r=.34, 95% CI 0.08 to 0.56), whereas for absolute change it was not. Social interaction design elements of the pervasive game may have some positive effects on the promotion of physical activity, although other factors might also have influenced this effect. Japan Medical Association Clinical Trial Registration Number JMA-IIA00314; https://dbcentre3.jmacct.med.or.jp/JMACTR/App/JMACTRS06/JMACTRS06.aspx?seqno=7274 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/761a6MVAy).

Background: Pervasive games aim to create more fun and engaging experiences by mixing elements from the real world into the game world. Because they intermingle with players’ lives and naturally promote more casual gameplay, they could be a powerful strategy to stimulate physical activity among older adults. However, to use these games more effectively, it is necessary to understand how design elements of the game affect player behavior. Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate how the presence of a specific design element, namely social interaction, would affect levels of physical activity. Methods: Participants were recruited offline and randomly assigned to control and intervention groups in a single-blind design. Over 4 weeks, two variations of the same pervasive game were compared: with social interaction (intervention group) and with no social interaction (control group). In both versions, players had to walk to physical locations and collect virtual cards, but the social interaction version allowed people to collaborate to obtain more cards. Changes in the weekly step counts were used to evaluate the effect on each group, and the number of places visited was used as an indicator of play activity. Results: A total of 20 participants were recruited (no social interaction group, n=10; social interaction group, n=10); 18 participants remained active until the end of the study (no social interaction group, n=9; social interaction group, n=9). Step counts during the first week were used as the baseline level of physical activity (no social interaction group: mean 46,697.2, SE 7905.4; social interaction group: mean 45,967.3, SE 8260.7). For the subsequent weeks, changes to individual baseline values (absolute/proportional) for the no social interaction group were as follows: 1583.3 (SE 3108.3)/4.6% (SE 7.2%) (week 2), 591.5 (SE 2414.5)/2.4% (SE 4.7%) (week 3), and −1041.8 (SE 1992.7)/0.6% (SE 4.4%) (week 4). For the social interaction group, changes to individual baseline values were as follows: 11520.0 (SE 3941.5)/28.0% (SE 8.7%) (week 2), 9567.3 (SE 2631.5)/23.0% (SE 5.1%) (week 3), and 7648.7 (SE 3900.9)/13.9% (SE 8.0%) (week 4). The result of the analysis of the group effect was significant (absolute change: η2=0.31, P=.04; proportional change: η2=0.30, P=.03). Correlations between both absolute and proportional change and the play activity were significant (absolute change: r=0.59, 95% CI 0.32 to 0.77; proportional change: r=0.39, 95% CI 0.08 to 0.64). Conclusions: The presence of social interaction design elements in pervasive games appears to have a positive effect on levels of physical activity. Trial Registration: Japan Medical Association Clinical Trial Registration Number JMA-IIA00314; https://tinyurl.com/y5nh6ylr (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/761a6MVAy)

Background: Interoperability in health care is a critical aspect for the exchange of health information. The Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) framework has become widely adopted to provide interoperable data exchange in the health care industry. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the significance of interoperable data in tracking patients who have contracted the virus and keeping track of the vaccinated population. Indonesia is one of the many countries that have implemented interoperable data systems to track patients with COVID-19, and it has aspirations to expand the system to other use cases, particularly in the primary health care setting. The primary health care providers in Indonesia include Puskesmas (community health centers) and private clinics. Objective: To promote interoperable health data exchange in the primary health care sector, the Indonesian government has launched the Satusehat project. The goal of the Satusehat platform is to make health data in Indonesia interoperable and exchangeable between health care organizations, particularly Puskesmas and private clinics. Methods: For a successful implementation of the Satusehat platform in Puskesmas and private clinics, it is crucial to understand the challenges that may arise. This study analyzed the pain points of the Satusehat platform based on a content analysis of the Satusehat Social Networking Service Telegram group messages. The study revealed the pain points and suggested existing approaches to address them, which can be used as a proposed design of interoperability for Puskesmas and private clinics, making it easier for these organizations to adopt the Satusehat platform. Results: The pain points identified in this study include issues with the FHIR server, problems with FHIR profile selection, and the mapping of electronic medical record data into standardized data, such as mapping into the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terminology. The results show that the value of the mapping issue is 37, profile issue 9, and server issue 61. Among the 3 categories, server issues had the highest population, followed by mapping issues and then profile issues. To address these issues, the study proposed practical approaches, including a federated architecture for the FHIR server instead of a centralized architecture, an FHIR writer and FHIR viewer system inspired by the Standardized Structured Medical Record Information eXchange system in Japan, and an FHIR conversion framework that integrates with our FHIR writer and FHIR viewer system. Conclusions: These proposed solutions can help resolve the pain points identified in the study and help the advancement of the Satusehat platform implementation in Puskesmas and private clinics in Indonesia. We believed that the proposed solutions have potential to be adopted to other countries with similar issues when conducting nationwide project in health care interoperability design.

JMIR Human Factors - a leading peer-reviewed ehealth journal

Augmented Reality (AR) superimposes computer graphics (CG) onto a user’s view of the real world. A key quality problem in this field is to achieve coherence between reality and CG when the user’s eyes refocus or change pupil size. We designed and evaluated a display that improves coherence by measuring the user’s eye state and continuously adapting CG accordingly. Our tabletop prototype emulates an Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Display, a common AR display device. In our evaluation, participants observed three pillars at different depths. We then challenged them to identify a virtual pillar among the three while freely refocusing their eyes. Results show that our design significantly improved realism. Compared to Light Field Displays, our design aims to simplify display-optics while providing similar quality. We could only partially achieve this goal. We discuss the lessons we learned and how we plan to overcome the remaining challenges. The experimental protocol from our evaluation is useful for display developers as it can be used to measure the coherence of a display.

The archetype-based approach has now been adopted by major EHR interoperability standards. Soon, due to an increase in EHR adoption, more health data will be created and frequently accessed. Previous research shows that conventional persistence mechanisms such as relational and XML databases have scalability issues when storing and querying archetype-based datasets. Accordingly, we need to explore and evaluate new persistence strategies for archetype-based EHR repositories. To address the performance issues expected to occur with the increase of data, we proposed an approach using labelled property graph databases for implementing openEHR clinical repositories. We implemented the proposed approach using Neo4j and compared it to an object relational mapping (ORM) approach using Microsoft SQL server. We evaluated both approaches over a simulation of a pregnancy home-monitoring application in terms of required storage space and query response time. The results show that the proposed approach provides a better overall performance for clinical querying.