Facilitating Inpatients' Family Members to Learn: A Learning Engagement-Promoting Model to Develop Interactive E-Book Systems for Patient Education

Educating inpatients and their family members regarding patient safety and protection is an important and challenging task for nursing staff. However, the effects of the conventional patient instruction with printed materials are usually not as good as expected owing to the learners' low learning engagement. In this study, a learning engagement-promoting model is proposed for developing interactive e-book systems for patient education. To evaluate the proposed approach, an experiment was conducted to explore the effects of the system on the learning outcomes and perceptions of inpatients' family members. The results show that the proposed approach significantly improved their learning performance as well as their learning attitudes, motivation, and satisfaction when compared to the conventional paper-based instruction. On the other hand, it was found that their state anxiety was not significantly affected by the approach. It is concluded that the interactive e-book-based learning approach can facilitate the inpatients' family members to well prepare for taking care of the patients without affecting their state anxiety.