Promoting Digital Proficiency and Health Literacy in Middle-aged and Older Adults Through Mobile Devices With the Workshops for Online Technological Inclusion (OITO) Project: Experimental Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Digital inclusion and literacy facilitate access to health information and can contribute to self-care behaviors and informed decision-making. However, digital literacy is not an innate skill, but rather requires knowledge acquisition. OBJECTIVE: The present study aimed to develop, conduct, and measure the impact, on digital and health literacy, of a digital inclusion program aimed at community dwellers. METHODS: The program targeted the recruitment of people aged 55 and older that owned mobile devices with an internet connection in 3 cities in northern Portugal (Paredes de Coura, Guimarães, and Barcelos). The program was titled the Workshops for Online Technological Inclusion (OITO) project and, in each city, was promoted by the coordinator of municipal projects and organized as an in-person 8-workshop program, using mobile devices, smartphones, or tablets. A quasi-experimental design was used with a nonrandomized allocation of participants in each set of 8 workshops. Sociodemographic, health status, and mobile use information were collected at baseline. Digital and health literacy were measured via the Mobile Device Proficiency Questionnaire and the Health Literacy Scale questionnaires, respectively, at baseline (T1), program completion (T2), and a 1-month follow-up (T3). A self-reported measure of autonomy was evaluated at T1 and T2 using a visual scale. RESULTS: Most participants were women with primary schooling (up to 4 years) aged between 65 and 74 years and retired. The intervention had an 81% (97/120) recruitment rate, 53% (43/81) adherence, and 94% (67/71) satisfaction rate, with 81 participants completing the entire 8-workshop program. Most participants had owned their mobile device for more than one year (64/81, 79%), were frequent daily users (70/81, 86%), and had received their mobile device from someone else (33/64, 52%). Over 80% (71/81) of the participants who completed the intervention used Android smartphones. At baseline, participants had low baseline scores in digital literacy, but medium-high baseline scores in health literacy. They showed significant improvement in digital literacy at T2 and T3 compared to T1, but without a significant difference between T2 and T3, regardless of sex, age, or schooling. A significant improvement in self-reported autonomy was observed at T3 compared with baseline. Regarding health literacy, no significant differences were found at T2 or T3 compared to the baseline. CONCLUSIONS: The feasibility indicators showed that the OITO project methodology had a substantial rate of recruitment and satisfaction. Program participants had significant improvement in digital literacy after 8 workshops and maintained their score 1 month after completing the intervention. There was no significant change in health literacy during the project period.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".