Designing a Patient-Friendly Website for Newly Diagnosed Cancer Patients with the Participatory Health Research Approach.

High-quality and user-friendly patient information material (PIM) is essential for understanding and accepting a new care programme. When optimising the PIM of the integrated, cross-sectoral psycho-oncological (isPO) care programme, the design of the fifth element of the patient information strategy-the patient-friendly website-was still pending. In this paper, the iterative design process of the patient-friendly isPO website is described. We applied the participatory health research (PHR) approach to enable high levels of participation of its respective end-users (e.g., cancer survivors), service providers, and experts. The design included six steps: (1) initiation, (2) planning, (3) initial idea exploration, (4) creation of a first working version, (5) three optimisation loops, and (6) dissemination. An exploratory mixed-methods design has been used. Qualitative data collection included document analysis, interviews, and participatory action research (PAR) loops with focus groups. Finally, the quality of the newly designed website was quantitatively assessed with the UPIM-Check, a user-friendly instrument for assessing and optimising PIM. The PHR approach was indispensable for the design of our needs-oriented, patient-friendly website. Participants' high levels of participation strongly contributed to the products' quality. The final descriptive statistical evaluation shows that the final website was rated very good on average by its end-users.

Is the speaking fundamental frequency in females related to body height?

The aim of the study was to determine the impact of body height on speaking fundamental frequency (SF0) while controlling for as many as possible influencing factors such as habits, biophysical conditions, medication, diseases, and others. Fifty-eight females were analyzed during spontaneous speech (i.e. explaining driving directions or a cooking recipe) of at least 60 seconds at comfortable pitch and loudness. The subjects showed a moderate negative and significant correlation between body height and SF0 (r = -0.40, P = 0.002). With r(2) = 0.16, however, a reasonable portion (16%) of the variance in SF0 is explained by the variance in body height. In comparison with other factors for which a correlation with SF0 was mentioned in literature (hypothyrodism, hemodialysis, auditory-maleness after female-to-male transsexualism, body weight, body mass index, and body fat), body height accounted for most of the proportion of SF0 in females. It is therefore possible to validate body height as a factor to account for in clinical F0 measurement.