Creating and implementing a medical consultation recording app: Improving health information recall and shared decision-making with My Care Conversations.

Research indicates that recording medical consultations benefits patients by helping them recall information pertinent to their care. Cancer Care Alberta set out to develop a mobile recording app to enable patients to safely and securely record appointments and take notes. Stakeholder engagement was conducted with patients, healthcare providers, and the Alberta Health Services Legal & Privacy team.

Sleep-wake behavior and responses to sleep deprivation and immune challenge of protein kinase RNA-activated knockout mice.

Protein Kinase RNA-activated (PKR) is an enzyme that plays a role in many systemic processes, including modulation of inflammation, and is implicated in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). PKR phosphorylation results in the production of several cytokines involved in the regulation / modulation of sleep, including interleukin-1β, tumor necrosis factor-α and interferon-γ. We hypothesized targeting PKR would alter spontaneous sleep of mice, attenuate responses to sleep deprivation, and inhibit responses to immune challenge.

Designing and Validating a Comprehensive Patient-Reported Outcomes Measure for Ambulatory Cancer Settings: The Revised Edmonton Symptom Assessment System for Cancer.

Purpose: Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) information has been routinely collected in Cancer Care Alberta (CCA) for years using the revised Edmonton Symptom Assessment System (ESAS-r) and Canadian Problem Checklist (CPC). There was interest in combining these into a more comprehensive single measure tailored to ambulatory cancer settings. The purpose of this study was to validate an expanded and redesigned ESAS-r called the ESAS-r Cancer.

Multielectrode array characterization of human induced pluripotent stem cell derived neurons in co-culture with primary human astrocytes.

Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) derived into neurons offer a powerful in vitro model to study cellular processes. One method to characterize functional network properties of these cells is using multielectrode arrays (MEAs). MEAs can measure the electrophysiological activity of cellular cultures for extended periods of time without disruption.