The Evaluation of a Drug Checking Software Platform that Enables Remote Point-of-Care Drug Checking
Date
2023-08-30
Authors
Robinson, Derek
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Abstract
In April 2016, drug-related overdoses were declared a public health emergency in British
Columbia, Canada. At the heart of this public health emergency is fentanyl, a synthetic
opioid and the most commonly detected drug in illicit drug toxicity deaths. However, the
illicit drug supply as a whole has become increasingly unpredictable, especially since the
COVID-19 pandemic disrupted British Columbia’s drug supply, leading to complex drug
samples containing benzodiazepines and nitazenes, overdose on which is not reversed by
naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal drug as they are not opioids. One harm reduction
response to the overdose crisis is drug checking, a process in which a sample of an illicit
drug is analyzed to determine its chemical composition. However, access to drug checking
is not universal, and the implementation of drug checking services is hindered by several
barriers, such as the need for skilled technicians to analyze drug checking data. In this
thesis, I describe research I conducted to evaluate a drug checking software platform that
facilitates the distributed drug checking model, a model by which drug checking is performed
without skilled technicians being geographically present. The research conducted in this
thesis comprises two studies: a heuristic evaluation of the software and semi-structured
interviews with harm reduction service providers and service users. These two studies lead
to three main contributions, which are: (1) a set of usability problems with the software
platform and various fixes for them, (2) a set of barriers and facilitators that are associated
with the distributed model of drug checking and the software platform, and (3) a set of
design considerations for a self-service drug checking kiosk, which is a potential future
iteration of the software platform.
Description
Keywords
drug checking, overdose, spectroscopy, harm reduction, fentanyl, human-computer interaction