Seminar Series
Title
Requirement Specification and Initial Design of a Mobile Health App prototype for Patients with COPD to Optimize their Routine Physical Activity
Speaker
Dr. Samina Abidi
Time and Date
12 – 1 pm ADT, October 16, 2024
Location
MS Teams Join the meeting now
Synopsis
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) has the highest prevalence in the three Maritimes Provinces in Canada. Health authorities across Maritimes Provinces are focusing on managing COPD in community-based primary care (CBPC) facilities, such as Fredericton Downtown Community Health Centre (FDCHC) in NB. There are numerous challenges at patient, provider, and system levels, that influence the capacity of primary care teams to provide care to patients. A variety of technological advances in mobile health, sensors/wearables, automated data capturing and feedback formats, hold promise for optimizing COPD management in CBPC settings such as FDCHC. The objectives of this research are (i) to understand the self-management needs of the COPD patients and ascertain requirement specifications and feasibility of a COPD eHealth intervention; (ii) to develop and evaluate a smartphone application based on intelligent monitoring of symptoms, routine physical activity, and environment factors, to provide personalized feedback to patients on their symptoms given the amount and intensity of their physical activity and the related environmental factors. This presentation will outline the results from a qualitative pilot study performed at the FDCHC for requirement specifications of a mobile application intervention for patients with COPD. Furthermore, we will present initial design and technical specification of the application focusing on physical activity.
Bio
Samina Abidi is a faculty member at the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology, at the Faculty of Medicine. She is also cross appointed at the Faculty of Computer Science. She has a unique skill set where she is a clinician with an expertise in health informatics. She is PI for several CIHR, NSERC and industry-funded research projects and has developed and evaluated many health information systems. She is an elected member of Digital Health Canada Board of Directors. She was granted 2022 ‘Annual Women Leaders in Digital Health’ Award by Digital Health Canada. This Award recognizes those visionaries who are harnessing the power of IT to transform Canadian health and healthcare. She is the recipient of the prestigious Steven Huesing Award (2007) from COACH (Canada’s Health Informatics Association). She is the recipient of the CIHR Canada Graduate Scholarship – Doctoral Award (Sept. 2006 – Sept. 2009) to support her PhD program. Samina Abidi has research interests in Health Knowledge Management, Clinical Decision Support, Health Knowledge Modelling and Computerization, Patient Centred Care, Comorbid Care Planning, Health Information Systems Design and Health Information Systems Evaluation. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles. She routinely serves as a member on national and provincial grant review panels and as a reviewer for health informatics Journals and conferences. She teaches health informatics topics in the Master of Digital Health Innovations (MDI) (Health Informatics) program and supervises medical informatics and computer science graduate theses.