INTRMS
Individual and Network Trust in Remote Monitoring Systems
Health & WellbeingProject Vision
This pump-priming project (INTRMS) considers how trust in human-machine networks (HMNs) influences e-monitoring of health-related conditions. The project explores the potential for a significant funded study to understand how trust and trustworthiness can be incorporated into internet based e-monitoring system design, implementation and operation in ways that allow security and design measures to be used to address user concerns rather than only engineering concerns.
Much research had been done on trust in eCommerce; less so for the emerging eHealth domain. Establishing trust in eHealth services is a particular challenge as the patient is not only the service user but also the service product in that the data transmitted via the web is about their own physical and mental state. This double link to a patient’s health, wellbeing and treatment makes trust in factors such as data security, accuracy, usage and connectivity especially salient and raises questions around whether the decision to trust in medical ICTs is qualitatively different to trust in other contexts.
INTRMS uses the case of remote monitoring of rheumatoid arthritis patients in order to:
- Identify factors that influence user propensity to trust in e-monitoring going beyond consideration of the user interface and system performance
-
Consider the implications for the design of web-based applications
-
Evaluate the internet mediated human-to-human interactions in an HMN.
Project Objectives
-
Incorporate patient data, captured through e-monitoring into the whole eHealth HMN ecosystem.
-
Investigate how trust develops in response to system behavior by taking into account key factors inherent in day-to-day usage such as user’s propensity to trust and their motivations for engagement.
-
From the analysis of collected data identify the factors influencing the trust network.
-
Identify associated risks to relationships between patients and clinicians and address these in design and implementation.
IT Innovation's Role
-
Data collection in partnership with clinicians managing rheumatoid arthritis at UHS.
-
Contribute to a state of the art review to identify key trust factors from previous work in the health science, social science and IT literature.
-
Data aggregation and mining, and onward reporting to the medical team about factors impacting on their propensity to trust such a web-based service.
-
Publication of results in a peer reviewed journal.
Project Fact Sheet
Funding body: Web Science Institute
Length of project: 11 months
INTRMS has received Web Science Institute funding.
