Reflections of Research

Meet Frankie, she is a second year medical student at the university of Sheffield and has spent the past 6 weeks working with researcher Miss Lauren Powell in a research setting for the first time. This is what she has to say about her experience...

I have spent the last 6 weeks on a research attachment in the School of Health and related Research (ScHARR) writing a scoping review on whether apps can be useful for children and young people with ADHD. I found the task a little daunting at first as I haven’t done much academic writing before and a scoping review was a whole new type of paper to me.

As I gained a deeper understanding through carrying out more research, I found this project really engaging. It has been interesting to expand my knowledge on ADHD and to find out about new apps that can be useful. I particularly liked the apps that used technology such as eye-tracking and the indirect apps that could be used by teachers, parents and doctors surrounding the child’s life. I am excited to find out about new research as it is conducted.

I have developed many skills during this project including; learning how to carry out database searches and screen hundreds of papers, improving my excel skills, learning how to make a consort diagram and improving my referencing. This is also the first paper that I have written with a literature review and I enjoyed how each part would flow into the next: What ADHD is. How it affects the child’s life. Why it needs to be managed. How technology is engaging. That apps are an accessible form of technology. Everything made sense!

I would like to thank our supervisor for doing a great job, tracking our progress each week and making sure that we’d made sufficient progress. As a novice in the academic writing world, I feel like this project has helped me to develop all of the skills required with academic writing and has given me more confidence that I can bring to future projects.

Written by Frankie Dimambro-Denson

Slack - A service built for the era of mobile phones and short text messages is changing the workplace.

The intra-office messaging system known as Slack is often described as the fastest-growing workplace software the world has ever seen. It surpassed two million daily users less than three years after its launch in 2013. Slack gives you a centralized place to communicate with your colleagues through instant messages and in chat rooms, which can reduce the time you have to spend on e-mail.

The reason for its success lies in part with big trends: more and more people now get work done on mobile devices, in collaboration with people who aren’t always in the same office at the same time. But Slack’s specific design choices have also been important. Gerald C. Kane, associate professor of information systems at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, points out that Slack funnels messages into streams that everyone who works together can see. That “allows you to ‘overhear’ what is going on in an organization, which research has shown can lead to business impact,” he says. “It’s a kind of ambient awareness that you just don’t get from e-mail.”

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Validic app enables remote medical device data capture via smartphone camera

Digital health player Validic said it's launching the first tech to facilitate data transfer from an at-home medical device that's not connected. In lieu of an Internet connection, its solution is simple: use a smartphone camera to record the data from a medical device and then integrate the data into the patient's existing electronic health record.

A large number of medical devices, such as thermometers and blood pressure cuffs, are expected to function with the VitalSnap app, which doesn't actually require a picture to be taken but does read data via the smartphone camera.

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