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Chronic illness and sickness includes more than just the physical treatment of a disease process. Health care relational models emphasize that adequate care for an illness involves ensuring that a patient’s emotional health and well-being is addressed along with one’s physical well-being. During a health care assessment, a doctorally prepared advanced practice nurse (APN) should take into consideration the patient’s physiological, social, neurological, and spiritual health. Today’s health care arena does not allow or reimburse for lengthy assessments or extensive health histories, practices, and support systems. The time allotted instead is spent listening to each patient’s current issues, making an assessment and diagnosis, and formulating a treatment plan and educating the patient accordingly. Because of the drive for efficiency, mainly because of reimbursement reductions, providers may doubt the necessity to discuss spirituality in the management of chronic illness. Patients that lack a social support system especially may benefit from a doctorally prepared APN’s nurturing of their spirituality for emotional comfort. Spirituality influences the ability of the patient to cope with chronic pain, either negatively or positively, and is acknowledged by doctorally prepared APNs as an important coping mechanism. For these reasons, doctorally prepared APNs should be aware of community resources to support patients with their spiritual growth and well-being.

We present Newton's Pen, a statics tutor implemented on a "pentop computer," a writing instrument with an integrated digitizer and embedded processor. The tutor, intended for undergraduate education, scaffolds students in the construction of free body diagrams and equilibrium equations. This project entailed the development of sketch understanding techniques and user interface principles for creating pedagogically-sound instructional tools for pentop computers. Development on the pentop platform presented novel challenges because of limited computational resources and a visually static, ink-on-paper display (the only dynamic output device is an audio speaker).We show that a system architecture based on a finite state machine reduces the computational complexity, and serves as a convenient means for providing context-sensitive tutorial help. Our pilot study suggests that Newton's Pen has potential as an effective teaching tool.