Digital Contact Tracing Applications for COVID-19: A Citizen-Centred Evaluation Framework (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Damyanka Tsvyatkova ◽  
Manzar Abbas ◽  
Sarah Beecham ◽  
Jim Buckley ◽  
Muslim Chochlov ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Evaluation Framework ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Domain Experts ◽  
Technical Performance ◽  
Health Authorities ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Usability Data ◽  
App Design ◽  
Compare And Contrast ◽  
Development And Evolution

BACKGROUND The silent transmission of COVID-19 has led to an exponential growth of fatal infections. With over 3 million deaths world-wide, the need to control and stem transmission has never been more critical. New COVID-19 vaccines offer hope. However, administration timelines, long-term protection, and effectiveness against variants are still unknown. In this context, Contact Tracing, and digital Contact Tracing Apps (CTAs) continue to offer a mechanism to help contain transmission, keep people safe, and help kickstart economies. However, CTAs must address a wide range of often conflicting concerns which make their development/evolution complex: for example, the app must preserve citizens’ privacy whilst gleaning their close contacts and as much epidemiological information as possible. OBJECTIVE In this paper, we derive a compare-and-contrast evaluative framework for CTAs that captures best-of-breed development and evolution concerns for CTAs organized into seven pillars. As our goal is to integrate and expand on existing work in this domain, with a particular focus on citizen adoption, we call this framework the Citizen-Focused Compare-and-Contrast Evaluation Framework (C3EF) for CTAs. METHODS The framework has been derived through mixed methods. First, we reviewed the related literature on CTAs and mHealth app evaluations, from which we derived a preliminary set of attributes and organizing pillars. These attributes were validated, augmented, and refined by applying the provisional framework against a selection of CTAs. At this point, questions to probe each attribute of the framework were formulated and iteratively tested on selected CTAs. Each framework pillar was then subjected to internal cross-team scrutiny where domain experts responsible for developing a pillar defended its sufficiency, relevancy, specificity, and non-redundancy. The consolidated framework was further validated on the selected CTAs to create a refined version of C3EF for CTAs. RESULTS The final framework presents seven pillars exploring issues related to CTA’s design, adoption, and use: (General) Characteristics, Usability, Data Protection, Effectiveness, Transparency, Technical Performance, and Citizen Autonomy. The pillars encompass attributes, sub-attributes, and a set of illustrative questions (with associated example answers) to support app design, evaluation, and evolution. An online version of the framework has been made available to developers, health authorities, and others interested in assessing CTAs. CONCLUSIONS Our CTA evaluation-concerns framework provides a holistic compare-and-contrast tool that supports the work of decision-makers in the development and evolution of CTAs for citizens. This framework supports reflection on design decisions to better understand and optimize the design compromises in play when evolving current CTAs for increased public adoption. We intend it to act as a foundation for other researchers to build on and extend, as the technology matures and new CTAs become available.

scholarly journals Effectiveness modelling of digital contact-tracing solutions for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Viktoriia Shubina ◽  
Aleksandr Ometov ◽  
Anahid Basiri ◽  
Elena Simona Lohan
Keyword(s):  
New Technology ◽  
Infected Individual ◽  
Physical Distance ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Digital Tool ◽  
Privacy Concerns ◽  
Technical Performance ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Behavioural Factors

AbstractSince the beginning of the coronavirus (COVID-19) global pandemic, digital contact-tracing applications (apps) have been at the centre of attention as a digital tool to enable citizens to monitor their social distancing, which appears to be one of the leading practices for mitigating the spread of airborne infectious diseases. Many countries have been working towards developing suitable digital contact-tracing apps to allow the measurement of the physical distance between citizens and to alert them when contact with an infected individual has occurred. However, the adoption of digital contact-tracing apps has faced several challenges so far, including interoperability between mobile devices and users’ privacy concerns. There is a need to reach a trade-off between the achievable technical performance of new technology, false-positive rates, and social and behavioural factors. This paper reviews a wide range of factors and classifies them into three categories of technical, epidemiological and social ones, and incorporates these into a compact mathematical model. The paper evaluates the effectiveness of digital contact-tracing apps based on received signal strength measurements. The results highlight the limitations, potential and challenges of the adoption of digital contact-tracing apps.

scholarly journals Fueling the Covid-19 pandemic: summer school holidays and incidence rates in German districts

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Plümper ◽  
Eric Neumayer
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Fixed Effects ◽  
Summer School ◽  
Incidence Rates ◽  
Contact Tracing ◽  
Robert Koch Institute ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Holiday Period ◽  
Health Authorities ◽  
Public Health Authorities

AbstractBackgroundThe Robert-Koch-Institute reports that during the summer holiday period a foreign country is stated as the most likely place of infection for an average of 27 and a maximum of 49% of new SARS-CoV-2 infections in Germany.MethodsCross-sectional study on observational data. In Germany, summer school holidays are coordinated between states and spread out over 13 weeks. Employing a dynamic model with district fixed effects, we analyze the association between these holidays and weekly incidence rates across 401 German districts.ResultsWe find effects of the holiday period of around 45% of the average district incidence rates in Germany during their respective final week of holidays and the 2 weeks after holidays end. Western states tend to experience stronger effects than Eastern states. We also find statistically significant interaction effects of school holidays with per capita taxable income and the share of foreign residents in a district’s population.ConclusionsOur results suggest that changed behavior during the holiday season accelerated the pandemic and made it considerably more difficult for public health authorities to contain the spread of the virus by means of contact tracing. Germany’s public health authorities did not prepare adequately for this acceleration.

scholarly journals Evaluating Usability of Academic Websites through a Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchical Process

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 2040
Author(s):  
AbdulHafeez Muhammad ◽  
Ansar Siddique ◽  
Quadri Noorulhasan Naveed ◽  
Uzma Khaliq ◽  
Ali M. Aseere ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Evaluation Framework ◽  
Analytic Hierarchy ◽  
Academic Tasks ◽  
Frequency Of Use ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
Academic Websites ◽  
Academic Information ◽  
Hierarchy Process ◽  
Usability Criteria

In the higher education sector, there is a growing trend to offer academic information to users through websites. Contemporarily, the users (i.e., students/teachers, parents, and administrative staff) greatly rely on these websites to perform various academic tasks, including admission, access to learning management systems (LMS), and links to other relevant resources. These users vary from each other in terms of their technological competence, objectives, and frequency of use. Therefore, academic websites should be designed considering different dimensions, so that everybody can be accommodated. Knowing the different dimensions with respect to the usability of academic websites is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) approach has been considered to be a significant method to deal with the uncertainty that is involved in subjective judgment. Although a wide range of usability factors for academic websites have already been identified, most of them are based on the judgment of experts who have never used these websites. This study identified important factors through a detailed literature review, classified them, and prioritized the most critical among them through the FAHP methodology, involving relevant users to propose a usability evaluation framework for academic websites. To validate the proposed framework, five websites of renowned higher educational institutes (HEIs) were evaluated and ranked according to the usability criteria. As the proposed framework was created methodically, the authors believe that it would be helpful for detecting real usability issues that currently exist in academic websites.

scholarly journals Evaluating process-based integrated assessment models of climate change mitigation

2021 ◽  
Vol 166 (1-2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlie Wilson ◽  
Céline Guivarch ◽  
Elmar Kriegler ◽  
Bas van Ruijven ◽  
Detlef P. van Vuuren ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Integrated Assessment ◽  
Climate Change Mitigation ◽  
Evaluation Method ◽  
Evaluation Research ◽  
Evaluation Framework ◽  
Systematic Evaluation ◽  
Integrated Assessment Models ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Change Mitigation

AbstractProcess-based integrated assessment models (IAMs) project long-term transformation pathways in energy and land-use systems under what-if assumptions. IAM evaluation is necessary to improve the models’ usefulness as scientific tools applicable in the complex and contested domain of climate change mitigation. We contribute the first comprehensive synthesis of process-based IAM evaluation research, drawing on a wide range of examples across six different evaluation methods including historical simulations, stylised facts, and model diagnostics. For each evaluation method, we identify progress and milestones to date, and draw out lessons learnt as well as challenges remaining. We find that each evaluation method has distinctive strengths, as well as constraints on its application. We use these insights to propose a systematic evaluation framework combining multiple methods to establish the appropriateness, interpretability, credibility, and relevance of process-based IAMs as useful scientific tools for informing climate policy. We also set out a programme of evaluation research to be mainstreamed both within and outside the IAM community.

scholarly journals REAPing the benefits: development and use of a structured evaluation framework to codify learning resources for Global Health professionals

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Meike Schleiff ◽  
Elizabeth Hahn ◽  
Caroline Dolive ◽  
Lillian James ◽  
Anant Mishra ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
Learning Opportunities ◽  
Evaluation Framework ◽  
Course Quality ◽  
Health Leadership ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Meaningful Engagement ◽  
Online Activities ◽  
Competency Domains

Abstract Background The learning opportunities for global health professionals have expanded rapidly in recent years. The diverse array of learners and wide range in course quality underscore the need for an improved course vetting process to better match learners with appropriate learning opportunities. Methods We developed a framework to assess overall course quality by determining performance across four defined domains Relevance, Engagement, Access, and Pedagogy (REAP). We applied this framework across a learning catalogue developed for participants enrolled in the Sustaining Technical and Analytic Resources (STAR) project, a global health leadership training program. Results The STAR learning activities database included a total of 382 courses, workshops, and web-based resources which fulfilled 531 competencies across three levels: core, content, and skill. Relevance: The majority of activities were at an understanding or practicing level across all competency domains (486/531, 91.5%). Engagement: Many activities lacked any peer engagement (202/531, 38.0%) and had limited to no faculty engagement (260/531, 49.0%). Access: The plurality of courses across competencies were offered on demand (227/531, 42.7%) and were highly flexible in pace (240/531, 45.2%). Pedagogy: Of the activities that included an assessment, most matched activity learning objectives (217/531, 40.9%). Conclusions Through applying REAP to the STAR project learning catalogue, we found many online activities lacked meaningful engagement with faculty and peers. Further development of structured online activities providing learners with flexibility in access, a range of levels of advancement for content, and opportunities to engage and apply learning are needed for the field of global health.

scholarly journals “Mainstreaming” Interprofessional Education within Hospital Settings: Findings from a Multiple Case Study

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Hollenberg ◽  
Scott Reeves ◽  
Mary Agnes Beduz ◽  
Lianne Jeffs ◽  
Debbie Kwan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Professional Education ◽  
Interprofessional Education ◽  
Interprofessional Collaboration ◽  
Organizational Outcomes ◽  
Evaluation Framework ◽  
Management Support ◽  
Realistic Evaluation ◽  
Protected Time ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractBackground: Interest in interprofessional education (IPE) to promote effective interprofessional collaboration (IPC) has gained momentum across healthcare, professional education, and government sectors. In general, the IPE literature tends to report single-site studies. This article presents a rare study that reports a largescale multi-site IPE initiative. It draws upon a newly developed notion of mainstreaming—introduced to the literature by Barr and Ross—that helps illuminate the implementation issues related to an IPE initiative.Methods and Findings: A realistic evaluation framework was employed to explore the overarching impact of this large initiative (involving 6 IPE programs within 13 hospitals) on the teaching hospital network in which it was implemented. Qualitative methods were used to gather a total of 142 interviews with program leaders, facilitators, and learners. Findings provide insight into the mainstreaming of IPE in relation to educational, professional, and organizational outcomes. Educational outcomes detail how inter-organizational partnerships developed among hospitals with the sharing of ideas and resources for implementing IPE and IPC. Professional outcomes describe learners’ experiences of increased awareness of the policy agenda and the meanings and value they attach to IPE and IPC. Organizational outcomes demonstrate that interprofessional champions with senior management support and protected time were core mainstreaming elements, and yet participants outlined a range of concerns and desires for the sustainability of this IPE initiative.Conclusions: This article provided empirical insight into the perceptions, ideas, and experiences of IPE from a wide range of program developers, facilitators, and attendees. Barr and Ross’ concept of mainstreaming and the use of a realistic evaluation framework provide a useful way to illuminate the processes and outcomes of implementing a large multi-institutional IPE initiative.

Virtual Team Performance and Wellbeing for Event Management

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed Salama ◽  
Cakil Angew ◽  
Gregory Fantham
Keyword(s):  
Performance Management ◽  
Virtual Teams ◽  
Team Performance ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Digital Transformation ◽  
Event Management ◽  
Cultural Variations ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Compare And Contrast

This chapter falls in two parts. Part 1 discusses team issues with emphasis on virtual teams. The first few sections briefly compare and contrast the different types of team and how team performance should be planned and managed, in line with set goals and detailed deliverables. This will cover a wide range of concepts that come into play under performance management and measurement. The following sections focus on the challenges that virtual teams face amid the prevailing digital transformation and suggest effective measures to address those challenges. The presented concepts are generic, thus can be readily applied to the context of event management. Part 2 comprises two sections; the first discusses well-being and cross-cultural variations in relation to event management, while the second section is focused on the role of social psychology in devising event experiences.

scholarly journals Effects of Tacrolimus and Other Immune Targeting Compounds on Binge-Like Ethanol Drinking in High Drinking in the Dark Mice

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 263310552097541
Author(s):  
Kolter B Grigsby ◽  
Antonia M Savarese ◽  
Pamela Metten ◽  
Barbara J Mason ◽  
Yuri A Blednov ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Risk Model ◽  
Ethanol Intake ◽  
Blood Alcohol ◽  
Saccharin Intake ◽  
Ethanol Drinking ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Blood Alcohol Levels ◽  
Drinking In The Dark ◽  
Compare And Contrast

High Drinking in the Dark (HDID-1) mice represent a unique genetic risk model of binge-like drinking and a novel means of screening potential pharmacotherapies to treat alcohol use disorders (AUDs). We tested the effects of tacrolimus (0, 0.5, 1, and 2 mg/kg), sirolimus (0, 5, 10, and 20 mg/kg), palmitoylethanolamide (PEA; 0, 75, 150, and 225 mg/kg), and secukinumab (0, 5, 20, and 60 mg/kg) on binge-like ethanol intake (2-day, “Drinking in the Dark” [DID]) and blood alcohol levels (BALs) in HDID-1 mice. Tacrolimus reduced ethanol intake and BALs. Tacrolimus had no effect on water intake, but reduced saccharin intake. There was no effect of sirolimus, PEA, or secukinumab on ethanol intake or BALs. These results compare and contrast with previous work addressing these compounds or their targeted mechanisms of action on ethanol drinking, highlighting the importance of screening a wide range of models and genotypes to inform the role of neuroimmune signaling in AUDs.

scholarly journals Efficient generation of receiver operating characteristics for the evaluation of damage detection in practical structural health monitoring applications

2017 ◽  
Vol 473 (2199) ◽  
pp. 20160736 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chang Liu ◽  
Jacob Dobson ◽  
Peter Cawley
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Data ◽  
Damage Detection ◽  
Evaluation Framework ◽  
Operating Characteristics ◽  
Damage Growth ◽  
Flat Bottom ◽  
Temperature Cycles ◽  
Bottom Hole ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Receiver Operating

Permanently installed guided wave monitoring systems are attractive for monitoring large structures. By frequently interrogating the test structure over a long period of time, such systems have the potential to detect defects much earlier than with conventional one-off inspection, and reduce the time and labour cost involved. However, for the systems to be accepted under real operational conditions, their damage detection performance needs to be evaluated in these practical settings. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) is an established performance metric for one-off inspections, but the generation of the ROC requires many test structures with realistic damage growth at different locations and different environmental conditions, and this is often impractical. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework using experimental data collected over multiple environmental cycles on an undamaged structure with synthetic damage signatures added by superposition. Recent advances in computation power enable examples covering a wide range of practical scenarios to be generated, and for multiple cases of each scenario to be tested so that the statistics of the performance can be evaluated. The proposed methodology has been demonstrated using data collected from a laboratory pipe specimen over many temperature cycles, superposed with damage signatures predicted for a flat-bottom hole growing at different rates at various locations. Three damage detection schemes, conventional baseline subtraction, singular value decomposition (SVD) and independent component analysis (ICA), have been evaluated. It has been shown that in all cases, the component methods perform significantly better than the residual method, with ICA generally the better of the two. The results have been validated using experimental data monitoring a pipe in which a flat-bottom hole was drilled and enlarged over successive temperature cycles. The methodology can be used to evaluate the performance of an installed monitoring system and to show whether it is capable of detecting particular damage growth at any given location. It will enable monitoring results to be evaluated rigorously and will be valuable in the development of safety cases.

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