This half-day tutorial, to be delivered in English, provides practical answers to the questions: – Monitoring digital health: how to produce comparable statistical data for assessing the adoption of digital technology in healthcare establishments? – What should be assessed in healthcare establishments' websites? and – How should it be assessed?
The internet has become the source of information that most people generally prefer. This is also true in the field of health sector where patients and their relatives search for information on hospitals websites before visiting them. These websites are the link between patients and hospitals and should be a reliable source of information and a centre of interaction where users can trust. In Greece, there are 240 hospitals, both in the public and private sector, which have a functional website. All these websites were assessed using the Health Sector Website Assessment Instrument (HSWAI), a four dimensional-criterion evaluation tool which was created for this exact purpose: to assess hospitals websites. In this paper, we present the results of this assessment where important and interesting conclusions emerged and various comparisons were made. This assessment evidences that Greek hospitals, while they have very good technological features they do not provide good and quality services to their users, which is the most important. Specific assessment aspects that should be reconsidered are also identified. We strongly believe that our findings could help designers, owners or even administrators of these websites to identify their weaknesses and find the areas that need to be improved in order to provide better services to their users. Finally, the specific case can be used as a guide for application in other countries where HSWAI application can provide comparable results.
Mobility has been a big issue in the cities. Nowadays, urbanization has extended its branches to rural communities to improve agricultural businesses. This research develops an experimental application of a cognitive model to test the right to food sovereignty and to enable rural families to develop their subsistence farming activity through integrated territorial planning, as well as technological and governance solutions that facilitate affordable and safe mobility for women farmers and promote fair trade. A qualitative-based experimental methodology was used for testing the model in the Cuenca city parish of Sinincay, Ecuador. Early outcome was picked using the mobile application named Allpa Warmi, which establishes eight cognitive strategies with use scenarios of empowerment of women farmers. The validated scenarios allow female farmers to manage the sales activities of their agricultural products, to promote sustainable mobility between the city and the countryside through unnecessary travel, with new marketing network circuits.
Zero-rating is the practice of mobile network operators in which data traffic generated by specific applications does not count towards a subscriber's Internet data allowance. This practice has received considerable attention in the discussion about net neutrality. Although in South America, some Network Neutrality laws have zero-rating restrictions, those are not absolute and have become increasingly popular among operators. However, some scholars highlight that the practice could violate network neutrality principles, and users' rights, while others argue that it allows users to access the Internet at a lower cost. The present article analyses the zero-rating offers in four South American countries using a political-economic and developmental approach to identify the possible effects on access, competition, use, and affordability. The empirical results reveal positive and negative effects, depending on a specific market, where zero-rating could be partially positive for Colombia and Ecuador but not for Chile and Brazil.
This paper outlines a research plan that aims to build resilient and adaptive systems for public sensemaking through conversational agent-enabled, narrative-based, autonomous self-actualization interventions. Our research follows a design science research (DSR) methodological approach that is comprised of iterative design cycles (DC) and provides design principles (DP) and testable propositions (TP) as an outcome. The individual-centered approach serves as a basis to explore ways to harness these narrative-based interventions for large-scale public sensemaking. The proposed DP have yet to be fully evaluated as testable propositions in an experimental setting, but we are considering future directions for improving the developmental intervention or allowing for easier evaluation.
Governments around the world carry out public procurement processes to pursue social-oriented goals and political beneficial outcomes. Profit-based objectives are not accounted for in public procurement, and this creates a natural environment for inefficiency and corruption. As a result, e-procurement tools have been implemented as part of government efforts to reduce corruption in both developed and developing countries. Yet, in the latter, e-procurement tools tend to lack effective prevention and control mechanisms. Particularly, in Ecuador -a middle income Latin American country- the government's official e-procurement system is devoid of automated mechanisms to detect and inform about corruption risks in purchasing procedures that take place within the platform. Unfortunately, according to past experiences reported in the literature, no existing e-procurement tool can be ported from or among countries. For this, we introduce a government independent tailored-made system that gathers data from the Ecuadorian official e-procurement website (SOCE), and analyzes its data to produce a set of indicators of corruption risks. Through a public web portal, the system will raise red flags upon detecting procedures where transparency, concurrency and legality principles are at risk. We believe that this tool will strengthen citizen control over public procurement in Ecuador and, in the near future, will allow us to integrate smart algorithms to automatically oversee public procurement in this country.
Humans as sensors is the paradigm for transforming the idea of a “smart city” into the concept of a “cognitive city”. While the concept of smart cities is based on the notion of using technology to improve city life, cognitive cities take it a step further by utilizing the large amounts of data generated by people to make informed decisions. In developed countries, numerous projects have been successfully implemented using cognitive computing models in areas such as health, transport, and energy sustainability. However, in developing countries such as Ecuador, the collection of data is often a challenge, making it difficult to implement these types of projects. Therefore, in this paper, we present a comprehensive approach to identify available data sources, including open data, social media, and IoT networks, to start the path toward cognitive cities. Our main objective is to present and facilitate the understanding of those datasets by classifying them according to their context of use around their importance in a cognitive city. In this sense, this document consolidates 547 datasets from open portals and describes several proposals in which sensors generate data as part of the Internet of Things infrastructures. Besides, we corroborated that Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube are the most used online social networks in terms of e-participation mainly. We then identified the most relevant categories based on the data available from the analyzed data sources for cities in Ecuador. The results presented establish the need to understand, retrieve and use these data by government, academic, industrial, or research entities. Thus, decision-making processes may be implemented to improve the quality of life of citizens on the basis of available data and aim at building a cognitive country.
This paper aims to present the experience on the design and implementation of an Information Security Management System (ISMS) model given under the international standard ISO/IEC 27001:2013 for the security of public data. To do this, the model taken as a reference is the one implemented by the Property Registry of the Pedro Moncayo Canton (PRPMC), Pichincha Province, Ecuador which due to its operability in the management of public data, brought about the achievement of said ISO international seal on Information Security and therefore became a benchmark for good practices in Ecuador at a national level. A quantitative methodology was used to analyze the design of the ISMS adopted by the PRPMC, under the international standard ISO/IEC 27001:2013 with the integration of some national regulations issued by the different competent control bodies. When a model is implemented, it can be considered that it indisputably ensures public data at a good level and allows us to be prepared through a contingency plan in the face of any adversity that implies damage or loss of physical or digital information and therefore be able to continue operating. In the same way, through the Gray Box-type ethical hacking reports, the evolution of the security and vulnerabilities of public data allocated at servers and in the cloud is shown. In the Property Registry case, the object of this study, it can be determined that said institution has reached a high standard of security of public data that guarantees reliability and trust of the procedures and contracts registered by the owners of any type of property in the canton. As a conclusion then it is recommended to take the protection of personal information of citizens as an obligation of the Ecuadorian State. This can be done through the updating of regulations so that the entities that handle public data are forced to implement information security based on these international standards.
Currently, in Russia, as in other countries, various projects in the sphere of digital government are being considered and implemented. Assessing the prospects for further way on improving the quality and efficiency of providing public digital services, the concept of the citizen's digital profile is consistently mentioned as a universal tool that will allow a citizen to effectively manage personal data or records accumulated in the public sector and exchange them with the state, organizations and other individuals. A key element of such a digital profile should be a digital consent system designed to transfer data from state registers to other persons in order to receive services from them. Thus, a kind of digital trust environment should be formed between the participants of digital interaction. The digital profile in terms of its infrastructure will have to be based on existing IT solutions such as the Russian National portal of public services and the National unified identification and authentication system. The suggested study proposes to evaluate and analyze the legal aspects of the citizen's digital profile project proposed by the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of the Russia in the context of compliance with current legislation and practice, as well as international practice of implementing similar solutions and projects.
The youth in the Global South are facing high levels of unemployment. The platform economy provides new employment avenues, many of which are accessible from anywhere on the globe. Thus, some Global South countries are seeing the platform economy as a potential alternative to traditional employment. The objective of the study is to examine the different platform economy employment opportunities for youth in the Global South. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the topic by means of the best available knowledge, a systematic literature review was performed using scholarly databases and a thematic analysis. The results show that there are five major categories of platform types with different job opportunities under each. For each platform type, the job opportunities, required skills, entry requirements and related challenges are presented. The contribution of the paper is to provide a literature-based guide on platform opportunities for the youth in the Global South, along with associated requirements and risks.
The use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) innovations significantly changes the day-to-day operations of both the private and public sectors as they try to improve business operations. These innovations offer potential service enhancement for the public sector such as improved effective and efficient government services and better service delivery, among others. In light of this, the South African government embarked on a few innovation initiatives in an effort to implement e-Government. However, the government faced several challenges such as ICT skills shortage, inadequate resources, high level of illiteracy, inadequate ICT infrastructure and the high cost of implementing e-Government. In the midst of these e-Government challenges, Software as a Service (SaaS), can resolve these challenges because it is an advent that promises potential benefits such as improving the efficiency and effectiveness of IT service and better service delivery to citizens. It is against this background that this paper explores South Africa to harness SaaS for e-Government implementation. To achieve this, the paper employs a Systematic Literature Review. This study surveyed SaaS benefits to E-Government in developing counties by selecting South Africa as a case study. Key findings of this study reveal that more government departments around the globe are migrating to SaaS to advance e-Government implementation. The finding further revealed that legislation compliance is also vital in the South African context. SaaS solutions promise to advance e-Government implementation and improve efficiency and effective government services in South Africa.
Student dropout and retention are a major concern in Higher Education Institutions(HEIs). HEIs use the benefits of Learning Analytics (LA) dashboards to address this concern by monitoring student's academic progress and identify students at risk. This study adds to the existing body of knowledge, the experience of designing, implementing, and evaluating a dropout and retention dashboard embedded in an academic counseling system. Through the use of a Design-Based Research methodology, we show the process of going from the needs analysis level, through 3 iterations to test and evaluate the dashboard, to end with preliminary design principles. The lessons learned serve as a guide for LA designers in the implementation of such dashboards.
Territorial planning plans are the result of the search for primary and secondary information sources with the knowledge of the technical team in charge of preparing or updating them, and ideally using the citizen's knowledge of the territory. To this end, various forms of citizen participation have been explored without much success. In the case study of this article, the Territorial Plan of the Cuenca Municipality, updated until 2022, has been analyzed, where the main result has been the lack of citizen participation. This article proposes a framework that describes the steps of organization, systematization and analysis of geographic information sources for Cuenca, where the large amount of existing but little used information is identified and that motivates the creation of a Virtual Assistant (VA) with specialized training according to the territorial planning axes defined for this municipality. This assistant must work on a platform for the integration and interoperability of geospatial information and existing geoservices, which is the SDI UCuenca.
Voting advice applications are web-based tools designed to guide citizens toward the parties and candidates close to their political preferences. However, they require the generation of candidates' profiles, and they must fill out a questionnaire scientists have designed. Since this procedure is time-consuming and expensive, we propose a data-driven model which can facilitate the construction of the profiles using the recent developments in the Natural Language Processing domain. To this end, we first gather the politicians' Twitter data and YouTube videos. Then we clean the data and translate the tweets and video transcripts. We aim to use a question-answering (QA) model, which takes a question and a context and predicts the answer using the context. Our Twitter and YouTube data is significant. Therefore it is not immediately suitable for QA models. According to the topics of the questions in VAAs, we create shorter context vectors using manually defined keywords. Then we apply QA models to the tweet and YouTube data. Our experiments show that this approach can automatically find correct answers in the data and help human annotators.
Technological advances and development in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in the health sector are growing worldwide. However, according to different studies in Latin America, there is a lack of knowledge, know-how, and technical skills to master these new technologies. Most medical software professionals can be considered “black boxes.” This paper focuses on a case study on the lack of technological uses of XAI methods in the health Ecuadorian medical system to support health professionals in treating and managing patients' diseases based on Ecuadorian data protection regulations. A survey was conducted with 71 Ecuadorian medical professionals to know their technological problems in medical appointments. Related works were reviewed to understand techniques or other existing solutions in the XAI field that can complement the designing of so-called health recommender systems. This paper shows the main results of the survey. These results provide guidelines for further designing a framework for managing sensitive data and developing the XAI health recommender system to optimize medical professionals' decision-making, avoiding third-party use of sensitive patient data for other uses.
Peer feedback in higher education is a strategy in the teaching-learning process. The application of sentiment analysis favors the exploration of significant information for educational management. The purpose of this article was to identify trends, areas of knowledge, and aspects that have been studied in peer feedback and sentiment analysis of educational texts. This research developed a systematic literature review of scientific documents. The classification was performed by applying the Zott approach. The results reveal the increase in research in recent years on the evaluation of unstructured educational texts such as feedback using computational techniques, such as text mining, natural language processing, sentiment analysis using machine learning or deep learning, or with a lexical or hybrid approach to improve teaching and the educational environment. However, few studies on peer feedback apply sentiment analysis to improve student learning processes.
TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service that has rapidly grown in recent years. TikTok reached 1.2 billion monthly active users in Q4 2021 and is expected to reach 1.8 billion by the end of 2022. TikTok, compared to other social networks, has a higher audience engagement, allowing information to be broadcasted quickly and effectively. In order to facilitate communities' exploration and topics identification, we present a study that includes the social networks analysis techniques in conjunction with the statistical and machine learning approaches applied to TikTok #learnontiktok campaign data to explore and provide insightful and valuable information about influencers, groups and educational areas and thus develop a data-driven culture for decision making.
Personalization and sophistication using new ICTs is the path adopted by industries intending to enter Smart Cities. This work seeks to provide a system dynamics model for forecasting the impact of innovations in auto repair workshops (part of the Automotive Aftermarket) in the Ecuadorian automotive industry. The model was used for simulating three scenarios: i) auto repair shops without innovations, ii) with innovations, and iii) with innovations, launch scale and budget increase. The goal is to prove that production performance caused and managed by increasing action that arises around the market demand and supported by business strategies based on ICTs and innovation that lead to decrease congestion, costs, delays, and unnecessary mobilizations resulting in a high value-added experience for customers as one way more to get a Smart City.
Several factors influence the success of the public sector's digital transformation. Case studies are often used in literature to study them. However, case studies usually focus on a single country or a small sample of countries, selected by convenience, geographical proximity, or even specified by the funding sources. Using data from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, this study conducts an empirical assessment and overview of the digital transformation of the public sector in the American continent over the last two decades. The aim is two-folded: first, to use an empirical approach to identify the best practice cases within the Americas; second, to identify trends, potential improvement areas and potential success. Our analysis finds that an empirical approach to identifying and classifying countries is possible. We find that South America and the Caribbean had a more favourable evolution than Central America and North America over the last two decades. Uruguay, Costa Rica, Peru, and Argentina are the cases with the most relative progress and success in the digital transformation of their public sectors and thus warrant further analysis. Income levels, governance approaches and strategies, and stability are key explanatory factors for a thriving public sector digital transformation.
Messaging platforms like WhatsApp are some of the largest contributors to the spread of Covid-19 health misinformation but they also play a critical role in disseminating credible information and reaching populations at scale. This study explores the relationships between verification behaviours and intention to share information to users that report high trust in their personal network and users that report high trust in authoritative sources. The study was conducted as a survey delivered through WhatsApp to users of the WHO HealthAlert chatbot service. An adapted theoretical model from news verification behaviours was used to determine the correlation between the constructs. Due to an excellent response, 5477 usable responses were obtained, so the adapted research model could be tested by means of a Structural Equation Model (SEM) using the partial least squares algorithm on SmartPLS4. The findings suggest significant correlations between the constructs and suggest that participants that have reported high levels of trust in authoritative sources are less likely to share information due to their increased behaviours to verify information.
