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Ankica Babic

Ankica Babic

Position

Professor

Affiliation

E-mail
ankica.babic@uib.no
Phone number
+47 55589139
Visitor address
Fosswinckels gate 6
5007 Bergen
Room: 604
Postal address
P.O. Box 7802
NO-5020 Bergen
Norway

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Ankica Babic

Position

Professor

Affiliation

Research groups

Research

My research area is Medical Informatics and includes projects that are carried out in close cooperation with healthcare professionals and medical experts. Some of the goals of this research is to gather knowledge from medical data and improve the flow of information in healthcare systems. The information systems that are being evaluated, designed and developed in this research can be anything from web-based systems, databases or mobile applications.

Teaching

I have taught and lectured in the following bachelor and master level courses:

  • Basic Course in Information Science (INFO100)
  • Social Science Perspectives (SV100)
  • Datahåndtering (INFO125)
  • Data Management (INFO212)
  • Research Project Design (INFOMEVI300)
  • Data Architectures for Information Retrieval and Web Intelligence (INFO323)
  • Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence (INFO381)
Publications
Academic lecture
Academic article
Doctoral dissertation
Chapter
Academic chapter/article/Conference paper
Poster
Short communication
Lecture
Academic literature review
Abstract
Report

See a complete overview of publications in Cristin.

Applications developed with students

Cherry: Mobile Application for Children with Cancer: 2013. With Erik Berntsen.

The Cherry project seeks to address the information needs of young cancer patients, their parents, and health care providers. It helps the patients understand the aspects of their disease and treatment, and allow them to assess and record their disease related quality of life.

Self-reporting for Bipolar Patients through Smartphone: 2013. With P. Berg Andersen.

Self-reporting of symptoms is widely used and validated in the field of psychiatry, also in the context of bipolar disorder. This paper presents work on a self-reporting system for bipolar patients using a smartphone to gather data from the patient, which is communicated to a server via a secure connection. The data is presented in a web application to a patient for his/her self-monitoring, and to medical personnel associated with the treatment of the patient. Consequently, the application is expected to be directly understandable to everyone involved in the treatment. Programming solutions will capture the essence, but will be adjusted to the electronic environment which will be validated for its correctness and user-friendliness

Designing a Safety Reporting Smartphone Application to Improve Patient Safety After Total Hip Arthroplasty. 2017. With Ole Andreas Krumsvik.

This paper presents a safety reporting smartphone application which is expected to reduce the occurrence of postoperative adverse events after total hip arthroplasty (THA). A user-centered design approach was utilized to facilitate optimal user experience. Two main implemented functionalities capture patient pain levels and well-being, the two dimensions of patient status that are intuitive and commonly checked. For these and other functionalities, mobile technology could enable timely safety reporting and collection of patient data out of a hospital setting.

Effect of Social Media in a mHealth Application: 2017. With Ole Andreas Krumsvik.

In this project, the potential of social media has been reviewed in terms of how it can promote a healthy lifestyle utilized in an app. A mHealth app for smartphones has been developed using Design Science methodology, where various features from social media have been implemented with the goal of increasing physical activity.

Multiple Sclerosis Application: 2018-2019. With Aleksander Tonheim.

Five study subjects provided information needs by suggesting functionalities and evaluating three existing MS applications. Prominent functionalities were to collect data about symptoms, physical activities, mood and goals in a form of a mobile diary. Collected data would be visually presented in a graph to support self-management and motivation.

Four study subjects were interviewed in semi-structured interviews with questions regarding the functionalities and the user experience after using the application, as well as using System Usability Scale (SUS). User feedback resulted in functionality adjustments of the high-fidelity prototype, especially in data representation of the Summary module and the way the Diary module would assess user entered data.

It is evident from the results that the application has four selected modules: Diary module, Physical activity module, Summary module, and a To-do list. Two medical experts were interviewed at two different times at the Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen, Norway, to evaluate two design iterations. The semi-structured interview consisted of two parts; one with questions on which the experts could elaborate, and one with evaluation of the prototype msHealth using System Usability Scale (SUS). Results. The results have suggested that healthcare personnel would be interested in patient data from a mobile diary, and how a patient should plan a day if suffering from symptoms. These are the two most prominent functionalities. Conclusions. Feedback from medical staff using SUS was promising. Several suggestions were given, as how to personalize the prototype to encourage the user to plan desired activities and learn how to live with the disease. All these new functionalities are being implemented to reduce stress, and include the prototype application as a decision support during a patient-physician consultation.