Picture This! Bringing joy into Focus and Developing Healthy Habits of Mind: Rationale, design, and implementation of a randomized control trial for young adults

Sustaining Joy in Serious Neurologic Illnesses

The goals of medicine tend to be framed around addressing suffering, pathology, and functional deficits. While this is a natural orientation when dealing with serious illness, it is also incomplete and neglects significant opportunities to improve the quality of life of patients, families, and clinicians. The "total enjoyment of life" is a multidimensional framework that can serve as a positive counterbalance to the "total pain of illness." It allows clinicians, researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders to take a systematic and comprehensive approach to the active promotion of well-being. The five opportunities for enhancing well-being in this framework are meaning, social connections, happiness/contentment, spiritual transcendence, and pleasure. Applying these concepts in clinical settings, patients, families, and clinicians can together find opportunities to increase the total enjoyment of life in the face of incurable and intractable illnesses. For family care partners, these concepts can be applied to improve self-care, enhance relationships, and develop more creative approaches to supporting a loved one living with illness. Clinicians working with these concepts may find their clinical work more satisfying and impactful and can also apply these concepts to their own lives to increase wellness. In clinical research, this framework can be applied to improve intervention effectiveness and relevance of outcome measures. Lastly, these concepts have the potential to impact public health approaches that focus on well-being and flourishing as the goal and metric of a healthy society.

Automated Workflow for Usability Audits in the PHR Realm

Teleworking is an everyday reality in today’s world. Many companies are opting for this way of working remotely, as it improves employers’ satisfaction along with the work–life balance and it does not lead to any significant reduction in performance. In general, the comfortable use of software applications is a priority, and quality aspects such as usability are of vital importance. In this paper, a novel workflow is proposed. It consists of the following components: (1) a tool to manage usability evaluations based on expert reviews, called Usevalia; (2) a set of heuristics to be considered when performing the evaluations; (3) a catalogue of usability requirements to guide the evaluations; (4) a checklist related to the heuristics to verify that the evaluations have been performed correctly by all the auditors; and (5) a set of tasks to know in advance the functionality of the applications to be audited. Personal health records (PHRs) were taken as a case study. This methodology made it possible to involve a total of 31 working groups that evaluated the usability of four PHRs. Concerning the main results, the evaluators agreed that with Usevalia the usability evaluations could go a step further because they are coordinated and can work together remotely. In addition, analyses of usability scores provided insight into current proposals for improving usability of applications.