Ágoston Kecskés

992868991

January 5, 2012

Blog Entry #3: Questions worth asking, literature reviews worth doing

The agenda for today was dominated by my search for a research question, literature review, and teaching exercise, and figuring out how to integrate all three. Having recently purchased an iPhone 4, I am all too familiar with the gaping abyss separating the iPhone 4’s purported benefits and what it can actually deliver. My goal was to channel my frustrations with the iPhone 4 into a worthwhile, cutting edge research question. After a preliminary article search, I discovered that the literature on handheld devices in medicine consisted predominantly of articles on outdated devices. As the first iPhone was only released in 2007, there was a significant gap in the literature on more recent devices. Narrowing my search to the use of smartphones in medical education (and, specifically, in medical students) yielded essentially no articles. I know that students are not using Palm devices or Pocket PCs (at least not any more) in the clinical setting, so naturally I am forced to ask: “How are North American medical students using their smartphones as part of their education?” What better place to look for good hypotheses than in the literature on older devices? Fortunately, this literature is relatively limited and well bounded so it should be manageable within the given timeframe. An alternative would be to formulate hypotheses using the literature on resident and/or physician use of both older devices and more recent smartphones. For my teaching exercise, therefore, I plan to assemble an interactive seminar on tips for medical student smartphone users in medical education.