scholarly journals The Informatics Stack: A Heuristic Tool for Informatics Teaching

2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (S 01) ◽  
pp. e129-e133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold Lehmann

Summary Objective: To develop a heuristic framework for students to organize and apply the many concepts of informatics for rapid use. Method: Organization of curriculum material and recurrent refinement by student feedback. An Informatics Stack was developed based on several existing informatics and software-development frameworks comprising several levels of abstraction, from what a system is supposed to accomplish (4 levels) to how it accomplishes it (5 levels). At each level, there are specific concerns, types of interoperability, ethical and legal issues, testing and evaluation approaches and methods, and relevant scientific disciplines, and privacy (upper 5 levels), confidentiality (middle 3 levels), and security (lower 4 levels ) concerns whose levels overlap. An 8-week Introduction to Informatics course was taught for 6 years to masters students of informatics and of public health, based on the Stack, with a Final Project continually filled in during the course, where students applied the Stack to existing reports describing health information systems and their deployments. Results: Student feedback from 538 students working in 116 groups over 6 years shows near-universal appreciation that the Stack helped to organize their review of the report. Each student, from a wide variety of backgrounds, identified some level of the Stack as something they might have otherwise missed, and all levels were invoked by some student. Attributes identified by the students as missing from the Stack concerned the practicalities of system development. Conclusion: The Stack is a broadly-encompassing heuristic whose application can be learned and applied by students from a wide variety of backgrounds in an 8-week course.

Author(s):  
R.S. Talab ◽  
Hope R. Botterbusch

As a growing number of faculty use SL as a teaching platform, outside of anecdotal articles and the legal literature, no research exists on the many legal and ethical issues that affect course development. Ethical issues include abuse (“griefing”) nudity and lewd behavior, and false/misleading identities. Legal issues include creation and use of copyrighted and trademarked items, faculty intellectual property rights in objects and course content, and criminal behavior. Following the experiences of the instructor and 5 students, their 12-week journey is documented through interviews, journals, weekly course activities, SL class dialogs, and in-world assignments. Additionally, 5 faculty and staff experts who teach or train in SL at this university were interviewed and consulted, as well. This study provides insight for designing courses that foster exploration of rich learning opportunities outside a traditional classroom-both real and virtual.


2013 ◽  
pp. 1368-1378
Author(s):  
R. S. Talab ◽  
Hope R. Botterbusch

As a growing number of faculty use SL as a teaching platform, outside of anecdotal articles and the legal literature, no research exists on the many legal and ethical issues that affect course development. Ethical issues include abuse (“griefing”) nudity and lewd behavior, and false/misleading identities. Legal issues include creation and use of copyrighted and trademarked items, faculty intellectual property rights in objects and course content, and criminal behavior. Following the experiences of the instructor and 5 students, their 12-week journey is documented through interviews, journals, weekly course activities, SL class dialogs, and in-world assignments. Additionally, 5 faculty and staff experts who teach or train in SL at this university were interviewed and consulted, as well. This study provides insight for designing courses that foster exploration of rich learning opportunities outside a traditional classroom-both real and virtual.


Author(s):  
Fiorella Operto

AbstractRoboethics analyzes the ethical, legal and social aspects of robotics, especially with regard to advanced robotics applications. These issues are related to liability, the protection of privacy, the defense of human dignity, distributive justice and the dignity of work. Today, roboethics is becoming an important component in international standards for advanced robotics, and in various aspects of artificial intelligence. An autonomous robot endowed with deep learning capabilities shows specificities in terms of its growing autonomy and decision-making functions and, thus, gives rise to new ethical and legal issues. The learning models for a care robot assisting an elderly person or a child must be free of bias related to the selected attributes and should not be subject to any stereotypes unintentionally included in their design. As roboethics goes hand in hand with developments in robotics applications, it should be the concern of all actors in the field, from designers and manufacturers to users. There is one very important element in this—albeit one that is related indirectly—that should not be overlooked: namely, how robotics and robotic applications are represented to the general public. Of the many representations, the legacy of mythology, science fiction and the legend still play an important role. The world of robotics is often marked by icons and images from literature. Exaggerated expectations of their functions, magical descriptions of their behavior, over-anthropomorphization, insistence on their perfection and their rationality compared to that of humans are only some of the false qualities attributed to robotics.


Author(s):  
Adrian David Cheok ◽  
Kasun Karunanayaka ◽  
Emma Yann Zhang

Intimate relationships, such as love and sex, between human and machines, especially robots, has been one of the themes of science fiction. However, this topic has never been treated in the academic area until recently. It was first raised and discussed by David Levy in his book Love and Sex with Robotics (2007). Since then, researchers have come up with many implementations of robot companions, like sex robots, emotional robots, humanoid robots, and artificial intelligent systems that can simulate human emotions. This chapter presents a summary of significant recent activity in this field, predicts how the field is likely to develop, and discusses ethical and legal issues. We also discuss our research in physical devices for human–robot love and sex communication.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
M. P. Pomey ◽  
M. de Guise ◽  
M. Desforges ◽  
K. Bouchard ◽  
C. Vialaron ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Quebec is one of the Canadian provinces with the highest rates of cancer incidence and prevalence. A study by the Rossy Cancer Network (RCN) of McGill university assessed six aspects of the patient experience among cancer patients and found that emotional support is the aspect most lacking. To improve this support, trained patient advisors (PAs) can be included as full-fledged members of the healthcare team, given that PA can rely on their knowledge with experiencing the disease and from using health and social care services to accompany cancer patients, they could help to round out the health and social care services offer in oncology. However, the feasibility of integrating PAs in clinical oncology teams has not been studied. In this multisite study, we will explore how to integrate PAs in clinical oncology teams and, under what conditions this can be successfully done. We aim to better understand effects of this PA intervention on patients, on the PAs themselves, the health and social care team, the administrators, and on the organization of services and to identify associated ethical and legal issues. Methods/design We will conduct six mixed methods longitudinal case studies. Qualitative data will be used to study the integration of the PAs into clinical oncology teams and to identify the factors that are facilitators and inhibitors of the process, the associated ethical and legal issues, and the challenges that the PAs experience. Quantitative data will be used to assess effects on patients, PAs and team members, if any, of the PA intervention. The results will be used to support oncology programs in the integration of PAs into their healthcare teams and to design a future randomized pragmatic trial to evaluate the impact of PAs as full-fledged members of clinical oncology teams on cancer patients’ experience of emotional support throughout their care trajectory. Discussion This study will be the first to integrate PAs as full-fledged members of the clinical oncology team and to assess possible clinical and organizational level effects. Given the unique role of PAs, this study will complement the body of research on peer support and patient navigation. An additional innovative aspect of this study will be consideration of the ethical and legal issues at stake and how to address them in the health care organizations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 100640
Author(s):  
M. Azoury ◽  
F.A. Mrad ◽  
I. Mansour ◽  
J.-N. Ibrahim ◽  
Z.A. Rjeily ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
pp. 096973302098176
Author(s):  
Nertila Podgorica ◽  
Emiljano Pjetri ◽  
Andreas W Müller ◽  
Daniela Deufert

Background: As a non–European Union member state, Albania is increasingly orienting itself on Western models regarding human rights, patient rights, and legal regulations for healthcare. Due to its limited fiscal and legal power, enforcing legal and ethical regulations poses a major problem. Aim: The aim of this study is to investigate nurse’s knowledge and experiences regarding ethical and legal issues in Albanian elder care in state-funded and privately run institutions. Research design: The study was conducted using an inductive and qualitative design, utilizing a focused ethnographic approach, based on Roper and Shapira’s framework. Method: Data were collected between June 2017 and September 2018 using participant observation, field notes, and semi-structured interviews with 15 nurses in seven different elder care institutions. In total, 100 h of observation and 15 interviews were performed. Data analysis was based on Mayring’s qualitative content analysis. Ethical consideration: The approval for the study was obtained from UMIT—The Health and Life Sciences University, Austria. Findings: The findings of the study fell into the following main categories: “Everyday care issues,” “End-of-life issues,” “Legal issues,” and “Ethical-legal education and conflicts.” Discussion: The participants reported many ethical and legal issues when describing their everyday challenges and displayed a strong lack of ethical and legal education. Despite a wide spectrum in the quality of care between private and state-funded nursing homes, older people mostly do not know their own diagnosis. Conclusion: This study indicates that further ethical and legal education is needed. Furthermore, nurses need to be better prepared for ethical conflicts with families, as strengthening patient rights could come into conflict with traditional rights of the Albanian family.


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