Rural Remote and Tropical Health Systems Digital and data connectivity

Digital and data connectivity

Leading digital transformation in ways that are workable, equitable, and fit-for-purpose in complex rural and remote health systems.

Research in this stream pursues ways to lead digital transformation across complex systems, ensuring solutions are designed for equity, usability, and sustainability in rural and remote contexts. The emphasis is on integration and connectivity, multi-level adoption, and translation of digital tools (including Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things as enablers of connectivity and system processes) to strengthen health systems and deliver equitable outcomes.

Projects and Partners

Investigators: Klaire Somoray, Denise Turner, Natalie Lloyd

JCU CHS Seed Grant

DA (Interactive Dialogue Agent) is a customisable LLM-powered virtual patient simulator with speech capabilities. IDA is specifically designed for healthcare education with built-in safety measures. This project will test IDA with psychology students to determine its effectiveness before expanding to other healthcare disciplines, ultimately providing students college-wide (and university-wide) dynamic and scalable simulations.

Investigators: Joanna Barlas

JCU Singapore Psychology Internal Grant

In this project, we will conduct a scoping review to identify the available, most widely used and most useful human and AI methods for analysing therapeutic change in therapy sessions. The findings of the scoping review will inform subsequent empirical research studies.

Investigators: Ailie Ross, Donna Rudd, J Wight

Townsville is the only site north of Brisbane that conducts the high-level testing required to accurately diagnose leukaemia and lymphoma, which cause a significant disease burden.  When patients are from remote areas, a higher error rate can occur, impacting patient outcomes.  This project seeks to design and validate novel technologies that can be implemented in regional and remote areas to improve diagnostic accuracy.