Emotional Factors for Teleaudiology

The internet has created new possibilities for health practitioners to deliver services remotely. The potential for telemedicine is yet to be fully realized. Many factors hamper the uptake of telemedicine, including funding models and the availability of technology. This chapter concerns one important area often neglected by technology developers: considering the emotions of users interacting with systems and services. The authors believe that consideration of emotions is essential for the advocacy, adoption, and appropriation of telemedicine services by a wide range of stakeholders, who have diverse abilities and motivations. They consider one area of telemedicine: teleaudiology. The authors outline emotional factors that need to be considered in providing teleaudiology services drawing on research from software engineering developing agent-oriented models of socio-technical systems, as well as knowledge of assistive technology frameworks. They consider how emotional factors can be taken into consideration with respect to a specific teleaudiology service provided by a successful company.