Macquarie University Hearing Research Centre, Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
School of Allied Health, Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia.
PLoS One. 2024 Sep 26;19(9):e0310521. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0310521. eCollection 2024.
Untreated hearing loss is reported to negatively impact on an individual's quality of life, affecting their psychological and physical health and placing them at greater risk of developing dementia. Despite this, hearing loss management is often delayed by up to a decade. This is likely due to difficulties in navigating the hearing care pathway, and the absence of a central, unbiased reference point for consumer-friendly hearing health information and resources. We intend to co-design an online support service for adults with hearing loss with the following aims: 1) to understand unmet needs and consumer barriers to accessing hearing health information, 2) to identify solutions to these unmet needs that can be developed into prototype ideas, 3) to incrementally build on iterations of a prototype until a usable online support service is developed and ready for real-life testing with end-users, and 4) to test and evaluate the usability, accessibility, and effectiveness of the prototype from the consumer's perspective, so that the prototype can be refined into the final product.
This will be a mixed method study. Consumers will be involved in all stages of the design of the project following the Hasso Plattner model of design thinking. The qualitative component will involve sprints and semi-structured interviews to access the consumer perspective and understand unmet needs and challenges regarding the access of online hearing health information. For the quantitative component, an online survey will be administered prior to prototype testing as part of the remote usability study to collect self-efficacy and eHealth literacy outcome measures via validated questionnaires. Data collection will also be performed post-prototype testing for evaluation purposes. Finally, heuristic evaluation of the prototype will be conducted by an eLearning expert to help refine the prototype into the final product.
未经治疗的听力损失据报道会对个人的生活质量产生负面影响，影响他们的身心健康，并使他们面临更大的痴呆风险。尽管如此，听力损失的管理通常要延迟长达十年。这可能是由于在听力保健途径中导航存在困难，以及缺乏一个针对消费者友好的听力健康信息和资源的中立参考点。我们打算与听力损失的成年人共同设计一个在线支持服务，目的如下：1）了解未满足的需求和消费者在获取听力健康信息方面的障碍，2）确定可以开发成原型想法的这些未满足需求的解决方案，3）逐步构建原型的迭代，直到开发出可用的在线支持服务并准备好与最终用户进行实际测试，4）从消费者的角度测试和评估原型的可用性、可访问性和有效性，以便对原型进行改进，形成最终产品。
这将是一项混合方法研究。消费者将在该项目的设计的所有阶段参与，遵循 Hasso Plattner 的设计思维模式。定性部分将涉及冲刺和半结构化访谈，以了解消费者的观点，了解在线听力健康信息获取方面的未满足需求和挑战。对于定量部分，在原型测试之前将进行在线调查，作为远程可用性研究的一部分，通过经过验证的问卷收集自我效能和电子健康素养的结果测量。还将在原型测试后进行数据收集，用于评估目的。最后，由电子学习专家对原型进行启发式评估，以帮助将原型改进为最终产品。
