BU Research Blog

Digital health, wellbeing and security working group lead Dr Anícia Rebelo Trindade 

The European Union (EU) revisited their Digital Competence Framework for citizens last year, with the new version published in April 2022. With EU colleagues, I contributed to the work of the Digital Health and Wellbeing working group. Together we revised and reframed the  Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes statements of the policy for digital health, protecting data and privacy. The research was conducted using a design-based research  (DBR) approach  (Mckenney & Reeves, 2014; Plomp, 2013); this protocol combines theory with practice and is used when complex decisions and multiple voices are to be collated and represented. In this case, the stakeholders comprised experts, volunteers, and Joint Research Centre (JRC) leadership.

From this body of work we have a series of publications underway, and one of these is a Springer Digital health publication, where the full peer reviewed papers from the 16th International Conference on Information Technology and Applications (ICITA) will be published later this year. Our methodological approach was highly comm

ended by the peer reviewers. The conference is running 20/21 October 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal.

The EU revised framework can be accessed here:

Vuorikari. R., Kluzer, S., & Punie, Y. (2022). DigComp 2.2: The digital competence framework for citizens with new examples of knowledge, skills and attitudes. European Commission. Available: https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC128415

and our presentation, summarising the work in the paper is available here:

https://www.slideshare.net/debbieholley1/digital-health-and-wellbeing-the-case-for-broadening-the-eu-digcomp-framework

Debbie researches as part of the Nurses for Long Term Health (N4LTH) research group, and the Centre for Media  Practice in Education (CEMP) research group. You can follow her on twitter @debbieholley1 @N4LTH @CEMP_BU