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Living with Technology : Digital Mental Health & Patient Flourishing
(2025) Sigurðardóttir, Steinunn Gróa; Islind, Anna Sigríður; Department of Computer Science
Healthcare systems everywhere are under pressure, and one of the ways to counteract long waiting lists and low resources is through digitalisation and data. Mental healthcare, in particular, has been fighting an uphill battle, bearing more than 30% of the overall disease burden while getting less than 10% of the total healthcare budget. One possibility to battle that skewness is to move towards care where patients are empowered to take greater responsibility for their own wellbeing. A way to do that is by relying on data collected by the patients and brought into healthcare. The term ‘wearable devices’ functions as an umbrella term for devices that collect physiological data and are used to track information that people can use for their own health monitoring. While there are different types of wearables, including smartwatches, smart jewellery, smart glasses, and smart shoes, smartwatches have gained the most traction by being easily available. Smartwatches are an attractive option to support patients needing to monitor their health metrics, with no exception for patients with serious mental illness. In mental health, monitoring objective data like sleep and movement can be useful, and adding subjective information like feelings can be determining. Subjective data can be derived from mobile applications (app), where patients can log their lived experiences. Changing healthcare systems to incorporate a more patient empowerment-friendly approach introduces new digital health technologies that the often-overworked healthcare professionals will then need to monitor. Therefore, adopting a co-design approach is essential in healthcare platform design, as it enhances the likelihood of the platform being successfully integrated and effectively used by both patients and healthcare professionals. Human flourishing—the development of individuals reaching their highest potential—is an integrated lens throughout this thesis, to truly try to understand the humans involved in this research. This thesis focuses on how digital mental health platforms can foster human flourishing by integrating the continuous collection of data into the daily lives of patients with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. This research focuses on the ways in which patients engage with wearables and apps to support their mental health trajectory and enhance their overall wellbeing. The research is interdisciplinary in nature, but the main target of the contribution is the field of Information Systems (IS). I discuss patient empowerment and introduce a shift to patient flourishing, as well as detailing the somatic experiences and data work patients go through when they contribute to science. Furthermore, this research outlines a co-design process with patients and healthcare professionals seeking to understand how to effectively co-design platforms that can be used in practice. Finally, I explore data trends from wearables on a group-level basis and an individual level basis. This research entailed exploring the feasibility of smartwatches, mobile apps and platforms supporting psychiatric care is studied with 21 patients and 13 healthcare professionals. It included using a co-design approach to design and develop an app and a digital health platform to support patients with serious mental illness with their treatment. The digital platform and app go by the name DataWell, the name reflecting on ‘Data for Wellbeing’. The patients in the study are all receiving care in Landspitali, hearing to two different diagnoses and thereby two units, the bipolar team and schizophrenia unit. Patients carried a smartwatch for six weeks, continuously collecting data into DataWell. Additionally, they answer six daily wellbeing questions in a mobile app. To supplement that data, they also answer a questionnaire three times over the interval, and at the end of the period, they attend a semi-structured interview. The overall method employed in this research is canonical action research (CAR), which adheres to principles emphasizing both practical implications and research implications. This research presents several key findings related to the design, development and use of a digital mental health platform and app. First, a co-design process with healthcare professionals led to the identification of two design principles: (i) clarity and accessibility of information from the patient’s perspective, and (ii) efficiency and flexibility for healthcare professionals. Second, the majority of patients felt encouraged by monitoring their data continuously and expressed interest in continuing the data collection. Third, a two-dimensional framework to capture patients’ experiences involving data work and somatic experiences, with the horizontal axis reflecting the physical impact of data work and the vertical axis reflecting its emotional effects. Additionally, emphasis is put on that self-efficacy is an important factor in patient empowerment and that a focus on individual behavioural patterns is more effective than group-based approaches for patients with serious mental illnesses. Lastly, the DataWell platform, which incorporates perspectives for patients, healthcare professionals, and researchers, was developed as a digital tool to support mental health management. The accompanying app prompts users to answer daily wellbeing questions, calculates a subjective wellness score (MindPoints), and provides a weekly summary of their mental health status. This thesis makes a three-fold theoretical contribution. First, it blends in with the growing IS literature on data work in healthcare. When patients participate more in their own care, their engagement in invisible data work grows. Second, it discusses a connected concern, namely somatic experiences, by examining how wearables and apps affect patients’ bodily experiences. Further – it demonstrates how individual-based data analysis can bring meaningful insights into healthcare. Third, it advances the literature on human flourishing and connects it to co-design, as well as conceptualising ‘patient flourishing’ and ‘living with technology’. This research offers a three-fold practical contribution to digital mental health through the development of two innovative technologies, the DataWell app and platform, and a novel approach aimed at improving treatment and wellbeing for individuals with serious mental health conditions. The DataWell app prompts daily wellness questions, promoting reflection and selfawareness, helping patients track mental health fluctuations. The platform integrates data from a smartwatch and an app, providing patients with clear visualizations of their data and offering healthcare professionals an efficient way to get a quick and comprehensive overview of their patients’ status that day. The data-driven approach constitutes another practical contribution by combining subjective and objective data, as well as qualitative methods with data-driven approaches; this approach provides a comprehensive understanding of the nuanced experiences of patients with mentalhealth conditions. The data-driven approach emphasises individualization through personalised analysis, is mindful of data-work and actively fosters patient flourishing.
Verk
Local democracy in the West-Nordic countries
(2020) Eyþórsson, Grétar Þór; Faculty of Business Administration
Verk
Digital currencies, SWOT analysis
(2023-08-25) Sigurðsson, Kjartan; Eyþórsson, Grétar Þór; Kristjánsdóttir, Helga; Faculty of Business Administration
The paper highlights the increased international trade and discussion in recent years of digital currencies, also known as virtual currencies or cryptocurrencies, including the bilateral trade coin bitcoin (BTC). Scholars have emphasised the need to consider different preconditions, focusing primarily on domestic perspectives of payment intermediation within individual countries. The inclusion of digital currencies in global trade is motivated by the recognition that time is playing an increasingly important role in trade dynamics. Scholars have presented arguments on the potential impact of CBDCs (central bank digital currencies), highlighting their ability to facilitate secure and seamless payment transactions in line with the primary objective of central banks. Conversely, sceptics argue that the mere issuance of CBDCs can potentially undermine the stability of the financial system. High interest rates tend to reduce the amount of cash in circulation. Therefore, higher interest rates do not stimulate digital currencies as investors seek to keep their funds tied up rather than floating. The purpose of this research is to consider the concept of digital currencies in global trade, reflecting the increasing importance of time in trade. Older generations have been reluctant to embrace this new way of doing business, and many questions have arisen. For example, digital currencies compete with traditional currencies, making government control difficult. There are also issues of trust, credibility, volatility, use across countries, use across time zones, trading time, uncertainty, disruption to current centralised economic systems, lender of last resort in the form of a central bank, as well as distance and culture in international trade. The methodology used is the well-known and classic SWOT analysis, which provides tools for analysing the pros and cons of digital currencies. It sheds light on the advantages and disadvantages of digital currencies, including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The results vary depending on the weight of the four measures provided. The practical implications are that it is important to be aware of the measured factors when trading: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Finally, it is believed that the value/originality of the research sheds light on issues that people need to be aware of when considering entering into a transaction using some form of digital currency.
Verk
COVID-19 handling strategy in Iceland : Centralised and expert-led
(Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 2024-11-01) Eythórsson, Grétar Thór; Haug, Are Vegard; Faculty of Business Administration
In this chapter, material from a case study based on interviews in northern Iceland’s Akureyri municipality is used to shed light on how and which governmental-level decisions or recommendations on crisis reactions were made and how actors at different levels reacted to and implemented these. The mayor of Akureyri, who had a very good oversight of how things developed, was interviewed, along with the chairman of the municipal council. This interview data is used here to investigate how decisions, including either recommendations or restrictions from the state level, were perceived at the local level. The findings will be considered in relation to how Iceland succeeded in fighting the pandemic.
Verk
Zoning for Zero - Climate impacts of zoning plans in a Nordic context
(University of Iceland, School of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2026-05-20) Jama, Teemu; Jukka Heinonen; Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering (UI); Umhverfis- og byggingarverkfræðideild (HÍ); School of Engineering and Natural Sciences (UI); Verkfræði- og náttúruvísindasvið (HÍ)
This thesis examines the climate impacts of urban planning, with a focus on its primary institutional outcome: zoning plans. Methodologically, it contributes by analysing planning paradigms, typically addressed qualitatively in normative terms, through quantitative methods based on high-resolution spatial data of the built environment classified by their zoning plan denotations. Using this mixed-method approach grounded in Critical Realism, the thesis provides quantitative evidence on how land-use zoning influences the carbon footprint of urban development, with a qualitative analysis of the mechanisms behind this evidence. The quantitative results from the Nordic case cities challenge prevailing assumptions from two directions. On the one hand, high-density, efficiency-oriented zoning seems to fail to enable argued low-carbon lifestyles, instead reinforcing high-carbon behaviours through consumerism and increased travel. On the other hand, lower-density zoning, widely deemed unsustainable, tends to dominate also in cities in locations where residents have lower carbon intensities and overall emissions, even when income and household types are controlled. The findings reveal zoning’s causal power to shape global emissions from the bottom up, although it is currently applied counterproductively. The thesis demonstrates and argues that using zoning plans to manage climate impacts, rather than building rights with per capita–based efficiency metrics, is not only a feasible and historically defensible reconception of zoning but also essential for urban planning to retain its public mandate as a libertarian paternalistic policy tool for climate-friendly development.

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