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.
Keywords hands-on health informatics training - smart home-based health platform - remote patient
monitoring - experiential health informatics
