The effectiveness of hands-on health informatics skills exercises in the multidisciplinary smart home healthcare and health informatics training laboratories

Abstract

Objective This article aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of newly established innovative smart home healthcare and health informatics laboratories, and a novel laboratory course that focuses on experiential health informatics training, and determine students’ self-confidence to operate wireless home health monitoring devices before and after the hands-on laboratory course. Materials and Methods Two web-based pretraining and posttraining questionnaires were sent to 64 students who received hands-on training with wireless remote patient monitoring devices in smart home healthcare and health informatics laboratories. Results All 64 students completed the pretraining survey (100% response rate), and 49 students completed the posttraining survey (76% response rate). The quantitative data analysis showed that 95% of students had an interest in taking more hands-on laboratory courses. Sixty-seven percent of students had no prior experience with medical image, physiological data acquisition, storage, and transmission protocols. After the hands-on training session, 75.51% of students expressed improved confidence about training patients to measure blood pressure monitor using wireless devices. Ninety percent of students preferred to use a similar experiential approach in their future learning experience. Additionally, the qualitative data analysis demonstrated that students were expecting to have more courses with hands-on exercises and integration of technology-enabled delivery and patient monitoring concepts into the curriculum. Conclusion This study demonstrated that the multidisciplinary smart home healthcare and health informatics training laboratories and the hands-on exercises improved students’ technology adoption rates and their self-confidence in using wireless patient monitoring devices.