The Effectiveness of Hands-on Health Informatics Skills Exercises in the Multidisciplinary Smart Home Healthcare and Health Informatics Training Laboratories

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.