(2018). Life-changing Multimodality: A Fusion of Modes in NHS Health Promotion Materials. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Health promotion in the digital era: a critical commentary
A range of digitised health promotion practices have emerged in the digital era. Some of these practices are voluntarily undertaken by people who are interested in improving their health and fitness, but many others are employed in the interests of organisations and agencies. This article provides a critical commentary on digitised health promotion. I begin with an overview of the types of digital technologies that are used for health promotion, and follow this with a discussion of the socio-political implications of such use. It is contended that many digitised health promotion strategies focus on individual responsibility for health and fail to recognise the social, cultural and political dimensions of digital technology use. The increasing blurring between voluntary health promotion practices, professional health promotion, government and corporate strategies requires acknowledgement, as does the increasing power wielded by digital media corporations over digital technologies and the data they generate. These issues provoke questions for health promotion as a practice and field of research that hitherto have been little addressed.
Multimodality and medicine: Designing for social futures
This paper uses multimodal social semiotic approach to explore the role that Multiliteracies pedagogy can play in developing patient-centered professional discourses and communication skills in doctors. In health care, a major challenge in managing chronic disease is that of engaging patients to modify their lifestyles and improve adherence to drug treatment plans. There is a need to ensure that medical students learn how to adapt and personalize clinical information for individual patients from diverse educational, language, economic and socio-cultural backgrounds. This teaching/learning activity is located in the Pharmacology component of a fourth year medical curriculum. Students participate in a design workshop where they engage with a ‘metalanguage of design’ and learn how elements like color and lay-out may consciously ‘target’ an audience. They produce and use a pamphlet or other Health Promotion artifact, get feedback from a patient and write a reflective critique on the process, motivating their design, content and ethical considerations. Both ‘product’ (pamphlet) and ‘process’ (reflection) are assessed using a purposefully-designed rubric. For this study, students’ work is analyzed using a framework based on Halliday’s metafunctions of language as well as the social semiotic theories of Kress, Van Leeuwen and others. Critical Discourse Analysis is used to explore the identities and power relations that are constructed. Students’ designs and reflections highlight the ways in which they draw on the public and private life-worlds of patients and of themselves, in order to make meaning across perceived cultural, social and language boundaries. In this way, students’ resources are validated in that they provide access to the professional discourses valued in academic educational context as well as the medical profession. Results also suggest that during the process of design and self-critique, medical students become more sensitized to contextual factors that impact on disease management. The process of 'conscious design’ within a framework of social semiotics represents a way of developing patient-centered communication skills amongst medical students, as well as preparing the students for the challenges of a multicultural and socially diverse working environment. In conclusion, learning the principles of Design may be a useful if unconventional component of an undergraduate medical curriculum.
Modes of Transitions: Developing Interactive Products for Harmony and Wellbeing
2018
People experience transitions throughout their everyday and lifelong encounters, whether it is in the roles they enact or environments they interact with. In transitions, people encounter the paradox of adapting to the changing and the new, while sustaining the unchanging and old situations. Dealing with this paradox, a person faces three possible paths: continuity, progression, or decline in their wellbeing. People oftentimes fall into the decline path, as revealed through chronic stress, emotional turmoil, and loss of order. Not all transitions may be resolved without stress or turmoil – and in some transitions, say, the death of a loved one, being fired from a job – stress and turmoil may be somehow necessary for the person to deal with the changes. But out of any transition situation, the ideal is that a person can emerge with a sense of well-being, and do not experience a lasting decline. Products play an important role in these transitions, and their outcomes. Think of a teddy...
2015
Telephone and web-based technologies such as SMS, smartphone apps, gamification, online/mobile games, online quizzes and tools can be used in personal health interventions in two ways: health promotion or social marketing. In response to the Queensland government's call for submissions to the parliamentary inquiry, a social marketing and design submission from four of the faculties at Queensland University of Technology was submitted. There appears to be a great deal of confusion in government circles about the terms ‘social marketing’ and ‘health promotion’ and often they are used interchangeably when they are actually significantly different approaches. Social marketing is the science and practice of behaviour change and involves goods and services that offer a value proposition, and which incentivises citizens to change their behaviour voluntarily. However, social marketing is often mistakenly used to describe advertising and communication or social media marketing. This subm...
Healthy Avatars, Healthy People: Care Engagement Through the Shared Experience of Virtual Worlds
Recent literature shows that new technologies can be used to promote patient engagement. The present contribution focuses on Virtual Worlds (VWs), namely virtual environments that multiple users can experience together thanks to the use of avatars. Indeed, VWs offer interesting opportunities for patient engagement interventions on two levels. On the individual level, customized avatars are known to have relationships with users’ inner experience and Self-conception, so that they may constitute a peculiar additional tool for psychological assessment. Moreover, they are able to promote healthy behaviors thanks to a strong vicarious reinforcement (Proteus effect). On the collective level, VWs constitute an ideal platform to support the emergence of collective flow states (Networked Flow) which are related to the patients’ creative activity and well-being. The present contribution deepens these phenomena, presenting VWs as an innovative and interesting tool for the patient engagement interventions of the future.
2008
Using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as a framework, my purpose in this paper is to describe some multimodal texts related to health published in a local newspaper in Alicante (Spain) in order to analyse the main strategies used to persuade readers and to catch their attention. In this paper, I intend to highlight the main resources used by the newspaper to establish an interaction between the discourse used in the multimodal texts under analysis and the addressees (i.e. the readers of the newspaper). For this reason, I will pay attention to the main visual characteristics of these texts: background, layout, size of the image, frames and information value. As a conclusion, I will point out how our society is influenced by the presence of new texts, which are clearly characterised by the increasing dominance of the visual mode. This implies that new literacies such as ‘critical media literacy’ or ‘critical literacy’ need to be developed as a way of enabling readers to develop ...
Positive Technology as a Driver for Health Engagement
Studies in Health Technology and Informatics, 2013
Despite the fact that older adults are healthier than in the past, the current trend of an ageing population implies an increased risk and severity of chronic diseases. Low resource healthcare systems face increased organizational healthcare costs, which is likely to result in an allocation of limited health resources. Healthcare organizations themselves must deal with patients’ increasing need for a more active role in all the steps of the care & cure process. Technological advances may play a crucial role in sustaining people’s health management in daily life, but only if it is “ecologically” designed and well-attuned to people’s health needs and expectations. Healthcare is more and more called to orient innovative research approaches that recognize the crucial role of a person’s engagement in health and well-being. This will enable patients to reach a higher quality of life and achieve a general psychophysical well-being. Thus, positive technological innovation can sustain people's engagement in health and invoke community empowerment, as we shall discuss in this document.