The recent experience sampling research for December is here! Keep checking this list as more articles are published.
- Adolescent Studies
- Alcohol & Drugs
- Diet & Nutrition
- Emotion & Regulation
- General Psychological Topics
- Medical Topics
- Physical Activity
- Physiological Sensors
- Psychopathology
- Smoking Cessation
- Statistics/Methodology
Adolescent Studies
A Prototype Exercise-Empowerment Mobile Video Game for Children with Cancer, and its Usability Assessment: Developing Digital Empowerment Interventions for …
“Medical advances continue to improve morbidity and mortality of serious pediatric diseases, including cancer, driving research addressing diminished physical and psychological quality of life in children with these chronic conditions. Empowerment enhances resilience and positively influences health, disease, and therapy understanding. We describe the development and usability assessment of a prototype Empower Stars! mobile video game grounded in behavioral and exercise theories with the purpose of coupling physical exercise with empowerment over disease in children with cancer.”
Associations between friend conflict and affective states in the daily lives of adolescents
“This study examined the associations between friend conflict, defined as arguments with friends, and affective states using a daily diary design in a community sample of adolescents.”
Students’ competence as eHealth and eWelfare service developers based on the International Medical Informatics Association IMIA’s curriculum structure and design …
“Multidisciplinary cooperation is required to develop digital health and welfare services. The aim of this article is to determine the eHealth and eWelfare service design competences that multidisciplinary students need to be able to develop digital services in health and social care. A secondary aim is to develop a measurement tool based on the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) curriculm for future assessment of such competences.”
Extent of Students’ Practices as Digital Citizens in the 21st century
“This study aims to determine the level or extent of practices on the norms or behaviors of the participants with regard to the use of technology. It is technically termed as digital citizenship. The descriptive survey method was utilized in this study. A researcher-made survey questionnaire patterned from an online article with slight modification is the main tool used in this paper. The research setting of this study is in one of the colleges in Muscat in the Sultanate of Oman.”
Exploring the Influence of a Smartphone App (Young with Diabetes) on Young People’s Self-Management: Qualitative Study
“Adequate self-management is the cornerstone of preventing type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) complications. However, T1DM self-management is challenging for young people, who often struggle during the transition from childhood to adulthood. The mobile health (mHealth) app Young with Diabetes (YWD) was developed in collaboration with young people to enhance their T1DM self-management during this transition.”
THE FEATURES OF MOBILE APP DESIGN MODEL FROM DYSCALCULIA CHILDREN PERSONAL FACTOR
“Learning disabilities (LD) is a term that describes specific kinds of learning problem. LD affects how the people understand, remember and respond to information. The most common LD are including Dyslexia, Dyscalculia and Dysgraphia. Dyslexia is difficulties in reading, Dyscalculia refer to difficulties in math and Dysgraphia is difficulties in writing. Nowadays, mobile learning is widely used in special educational practice. Hence, Dyscalculia children should utilize the mobile or tablet devices as supportive learning tools to support their learning. However, currently there are inadequate studies on mobile app design model for mobile app designers and developers in designing and developing mobile app for Dyscalculia children. Thus, the aim of this study is to develop mobile app design model called Calculic Model that includes 3 factors which are personal, instructional and environment.”
Table6: Creating an Engaging App Development Course for Middle School Girls
“This paper describes the implementation of an app development curriculum in a middle school girls summer camp program. Data collected, including the artifacts constructed (apps) by these young women, demonstrate that such activities increase awareness of opportunities in the STEM areas and empower young women to succeed in computer science.”
Development of smart phone-based child health screening tools for community health workers
“Child health screening is a fundamental component of public health, which includes neonatal screening, detection of infectious diseases and monitoring of nutritional status. Unfortunately, the tools to perform these tasks are often very crude, requiring manual input of data which is prone to error and falsification. Furthermore, the staff which performs these duties often lack clinical training or education. To meet this need, we have developed a low-cost child screening platform, called Baby Naapp, which enables community health workers to automatically collect data from a child without the need for any manual input”
BullyBlocker: toward an interdisciplinary approach to identify cyberbullying
“Cyberbullying is the deliberate use of online digital media to communicate false, embarrassing, or hostile information about another person. It is the most common online risk for adolescents, yet well over half of young people do not tell their parents when it occurs. While there have been many studies about the nature and prevalence of cyberbullying, there have been relatively few in the area of automated identification of cyberbullying that integrate findings from computer science and psychology. The goal of our work is thus to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to develop an automated model for identifying and measuring the degree of cyberbullying in social networking sites, and a Facebook app, built on this model, that notifies parents about the likelihood that their adolescent is a cyberbullying victim.”
Mood and physical activity in adolescents: ambulatory assessment data reveals distinct within-subject associations between mood dimensions and non-exercise …“Physical activity is known to preserve both physical and mental health. However, the physical activity levels of a large proportion of adolescents are insufficient. This is critical, since physical activity levels in youth have been shown to translate into adulthood. Whereas in adult populations, mood has been supposed to be one important psychological factor that drives physical activity in everyday life, this issue has been poorly studied in adolescent populations. Ambulatory Assessment is the state-of-the-art approach to investigate how mood and non-exercise activity fluctuate within persons in everyday life. Through assessments in real time and real life, this method provides ecological validity, bypassing several limitations of traditional assessment methods (e.g., recall biases).”
Using ecological momentary assessment to identify mechanisms of change: An application from a pharmacotherapy trial with adolescent cannabis users“The present study used youth’s in vivo reports of subjective responses to cannabis while smoking in their natural environments to identify real-world mechanisms of topiramate treatment for cannabis misuse.”
Alcohol & Drugs
Diet & Nutrition
Emotion & Regulation
“Based on the “broaden and build” theory of positive emotions, we explored daily dynamics of teachers’ emotions and their regulation, expecting positive emotions to promote teachers’ use of adaptive emotion regulation strategies, and trigger upward spirals leading to further use of these strategies and increased teacher well-being. Negative emotions were expected to have opposite effects. Sixty-two teachers completed daily measures of emotions, emotion regulation, burnout, and job satisfaction during 10 workdays.”
Involuntary Engagement Stress Responses and Family Dynamics: Time-Lagged Models of Negative Mood
“Low-income Latino youth display disproportionate rates of mood problems compared with peers in other ethnic groups. Dysregulation of the stress reactivity system, reflected by involuntary engagement stress responses (IESRs), contributes to mood problems. However, two important family constructs—parent-child conflict and familism—may moderate the association between IESRs and negative mood. Parent-child conflict might exacerbate the link between IESRs and negative mood. Fortunately, low-income Latino youth may benefit from the cultural value of familism. Familism might weaken the tie between IESRs and negative mood and the tie between parent-child conflict and negative mood. The present study used a daily diary methodology and time-lagged models to examine these processes among low-income Latino adolescents.”
“Recent research has investigated how adaptive emotion regulation (ER) strategies and maladaptive ER strategies interact to predict symptoms, but little is known about how specific strategies interact with one another when used in daily life. The present investigation used daily diary data collected over two weeks from an unselected student sample (N = 109) to examine how reappraisal, a putatively adaptive ER strategy, interacts on a given occasion (within-person) and across occasions (between-person) with putatively maladaptive ER strategies (rumination, experiential avoidance, expressive suppression) to predict daily depression and social anxiety symptoms.”
“Many adolescent mothers are parenting young children under highly stressful conditions as they are managing first-time parenthood, poverty, lack of housing, school and work, and challenging peer and familial relationships. Mobile health (mHealth) technology has the potential to intervene at various points in the emotion regulation process of adolescent mothers to provide them support for more adaptive emotional and behavioral regulation in the course of their daily life. The goal of this study was to examine the acceptability, feasibility, use patterns, and mechanisms by which a mobile technology used as an adjunct to in-person, provider-delivered sessions fostered adolescent mothers’ adaptive emotion regulation strategies under real-life conditions.”
“Successful emotion regulation (ER) is a central aspect of psychosocial functioning and mental health and is thought to improve and be refined in adolescence. Past research on ER has mainly focused on one-time measurements of habitual ER. Linking regulatory strategies to emotions in daily lives is key to understanding adolescents’ emotional lives.”
General Psychological Topics
“The purpose of this study is to examine the conditions under which daily stressful and positive events are associated with alcohol use among heavy drinking sexual minority men (SMM). Specifically, we examined the moderating effects of two indicators of alcohol addiction severity (i.e., alcohol dependence severity and negative drinking consequences) on the associations between daily stressful events and alcohol use and between daily positive events and alcohol use among heavy drinking SMM.”
“With the growing popularity of intensive longitudinal research, the modeling techniques and software options for such data are also expanding rapidly. Here we use dynamic multilevel modeling, as it is incorporated in the new dynamic structural equation modeling (DSEM) toolbox in Mplus, to analyze the affective data from the COGITO study. These data consist of two samples of over 100 individuals each who were measured for about 100 days.”
Elections have consequences for student mental health: an accidental daily diary study
“Polling suggested that the 2016 United States presidential election affected citizens’ mood and stress levels. Yet, polling often fails to employ repeated measurement designs that can capture pre- and post-levels of change within the same person. In this study, undergraduate students (N = 85) completed a 14-day daily diary where mood, stress, and mental health outcomes were assessed before and after the election.”
The Use of Intensive Longitudinal Methods in Explanatory Personality Research
“Intensive longitudinal methods (ILMs), in which data are gathered from participants multiple times with short intervals (typically 24 hours or less apart), have gained considerable ground in personality research and may be useful in exploring causality in both classic personality trait models and more novel contextualized personality state models.”
“Though research has demonstrated that gay men suffer stress-related mental health disparities compared with heterosexuals, little is known about factors that protect gay individuals from poor mental health and that buffer them in the face of minority stress. Using a daily diary approach, the current study examined three factors that may protect individuals from poor mental health: social support from friends, social support from family, and gay identity.”
“This study aimed, first, to determine whether the intra-individual variability in positive affect was related to the intra-individual variability in career decision-making self-efficacy, and career choice anxiety. The second objective was to examine whether social support moderates the relationship between affect and these outcome variables. The third objective was to find out how career decision-making self-efficacy and career choice anxiety change according to self-esteem and future time perspective.”
“Incorporation of details from waking life events into Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep dreams has been found to be highest on the two nights after, and then 5-7 nights after events. These are termed, respectively, the day-residue and dream-lag effects. This study is the first to categorize types of waking life experiences and compare their incorporation into dreams across multiple successive nights.”
The stressor–strain relationship in diary studies: A meta-analysis of the within and between levels
“Daily diary studies use the same set of measures repeatedly for several days. Within the work stress domain, these studies are able to isolate the effects of daily exposure to stressors within people from the general level of stressors between people. This meta-analysis investigated both content-related and methodological aspects of workplace stressor–strain relationships in diary studies.”
Daily transformational leadership and employee job crafting: The role of promotion focus
“Transformational leaders are expected to challenge their followers to take greater ownership of their work, allowing the leader to align followers with tasks that enhance their performance. In the present study, we hypothesize that transformational leadership is positively related to followers’ job-crafting behaviour – proactive behaviour aimed at optimizing job demands and job resources. Moreover, we argue that followers’ promotion focus (i.e. being driven by growth and development needs) positively moderates this relationship.”
“College drinking and its negative consequences remain a major public health concern. Yet, many prevention efforts targeting college drinkers are expensive, are difficult to implement, use indicated approaches targeting only high-risk drinkers, and/or are only marginally effective. An alternative strategy taken explicitly or implicitly by many colleges is campus-led alcohol-free programming which provides students with attractive leisure alternatives to drinking on weekend nights. This study aimed to extend work by Patrick et al. (Prevention Science, 11, 155–162, 2010), who found that students drank less on weekend nights they attended LateNight Penn State (LNPS) activities during their first semester of college.”
“Twenty-first century workplaces have changed considerably, not least through technological developments which enable employees to engage in voluntary information and communication technology (ICT) use for work-related purposes during non-work time without contractual obligation. The overall aim of this thesis was to examine the concept of voluntary ICT use, its antecedents and consequences for employee recovery and well-being in order to develop an evidence-based conceptual model as a theoretical basis to advance future research in this area.”
The effects of a workplace intervention on employees’ cortisol awakening response
“Work-related stressors are known to adversely affect employees’ stress physiology, including the cortisol awakening response (CAR) – or the spike in cortisol levels shortly after people wake up that aids in mobilizing energy. A flat or blunted CAR has been linked to chronic stress and burnout. This daily diary study tested the effects of a workplace intervention on employed parents’ CAR. Specifically, we tested whether the effects of the intervention on CAR were moderated by the type of days (workday versus non-work day).”
“Our understanding of how community-level context impacts care of persons living with HIV (PLWH), including antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence and retention in care, is limited. The objective of this study was to characterize the activity spaces of PLWH from an urban area in Southeastern U.S., where the epidemic is among the nation’s highest, and to examine how such activity spaces are associated with daily mood and health behaviors. In this small, pilot study, 11 participants were tracked with a global positioning system (GPS)-enabled application on their smartphones for 2 weeks. Activity spaces were created by connecting GPS points sequentially and adding buffers. Contextual exposure data (e.g., alcohol outlets) were connected to activity spaces. Participants also completed daily diary entry through texts 3 times per day regarding outcomes of substance use behaviors, mood, and medication adherence.”
“Leveraging smartphone technology, we sought to examine the usability of the RELAXaHEAD application, which has a headache diary and PMR capability.
Background: Scalable non-pharmacologic treatment options are needed for chronic pain conditions. Migraine is an ideal condition to test smartphone-based mind body interventions (MBIs) because it is a very prevalent, costly, disabling condition. Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) is a standardized, evidence-based MBI used for migraine which people can do independently and therefore might be best amenable for adaption in a smartphone application (app).”
“Numerous studies have shown differences in the functioning in the areas of the frontal-limbic circuitry between depressed patients and controls. However, current knowledge on frontal-limbic neural substrates of individual differences in mood states in everyday life in healthy individuals is scarce. The present study investigates anatomical, resting-state and functional neural correlates of daily mood states in healthy individuals. We expected to observe associations between mood and the frontal-limbic circuitry and the default-mode network [DMN].”
Narcissism and the Pursuit of Status
“The purpose of the present studies was to examine the connections that narcissistic admiration and narcissistic rivalry had with various aspects of status.”
“Sexual assault is a troubling epidemic that plagues college campuses across the United States, and is often proceeded by drinking by the perpetrator and/or victim. The goal of this study was to examine the effect of level of intoxication, history of alcohol-related blackouts, and childhood sexual abuse (CSA) on the likelihood of being a victim or perpetrator of coercive sexual activities.”
“This article models the chain of risk that links life course socioeconomic status (SES), daily stressor exposure and severity, and daily well-being.”
The Influence of Daily Leisure Activities on Stress and Work-Family Balance
“For many years, work-life literature has focused almost exclusively on the interaction between the work and family domains, without much consideration for the time spent in-between. This daily diary study examines the influence of time spent engaged in daily leisure activities on the health and well-being of full-time workers through its observed effect on daily mood, as well as day-to-day perceptions of stress, work-family conflict (WFC), and work-family balance (WFB). This study contributes to previous literature by providing day-level analysis of these variables, thereby offering a closer examination of their interrelated natures.”
Autism and Web-Based Learning: Review and Evaluation of Web Apps
“Challenges with social skills are the main barrier of people with autism preventing them to be independent adults. However, information and communication technology can help individuals with autism by developing and practicing essential social skills. The objective of this research was reviewing and evaluating web apps for people with autism using Mobile App Rating Scale. The review used a set of free apps from Doctor TEA and Pictoaplicaciones. Based on these websites, a total of 65 apps were evaluated using Mobile App Rating Scale. The results showed that twenty-five apps had an acceptable quality with scores over four. Therefore, the use of these apps could be recommended for therapists, parents, and people with autism.”
RuleSelector: Selecting Conditional Action Rules from User Behavior Patterns
“Modern smartphones and ubiquitous computing systems collect a wealth of context data from users. Conditional action rules, as popularized by the IFTTT (If-This-Then-That) platform, are a popular way for users to automate frequently repeated tasks or receive smart reminders, due to the intelligibility and control that rules provide to users. A key drawback of IFTTT systems is that they place the burden of manually specifying action rules on the user. While multiple rule mining algorithms have been proposed in existing work to automatically discover action rules, they generate hundreds of action rules, and the problem of how to present a small subset of rules to smartphone users and allow them to interactively select action rules remains unsolved. In this work, we take the first step towards solving this problem by designing and implementing RuleSelector, the first interactive rule selection tool to allow smartphone users to browse, modify, and select action rules from a small set of summarized rules presented to the user. We propose novel rule selection metrics to address the needs of smartphone users, and analyze the performance of RuleSelector using data from 200 users. We also perform a qualitative user study in order to evaluate how users use the RuleSelector tool and perceive the selected rules, and present the insights gained and design recommendations for future rule selection systems. Our users rated the selected rules from useful to very useful, and an important finding of our study is that users prefer an interactive rule selection system such as RuleSelector that automatically suggests rules, but allows users to select and modify the suggested rules. Finally, we examine the promise of RuleSelector in other ubiquitous computing systems such as smart homes and smart TVs by applying our tool to public context datasets from these domains.”
Maintaining Oral Health in Patients With Special Needs
“Patients with disabilities face many challenges in accessing oral health care services. This article reviews the barriers, strategies, and techniques tailored for treating this patient population that focus on promoting periodontal health. For caregivers of individuals with special needs, easy-to-use interactive tools like MagnusCards™, a mobile app that provides step-by-step guidance in oral care activities could help in forming the daily routines that can often be difficult for people living with cognitive special needs.”
“With the advancement of physical sensors and scientific modelling, we fortunately are able to track, monitor and even predict most of natural destructive forces, e.g. hurricanes and tornadoes. Compared to other natural disasters, earthquakes are particularly traumatic because they occur without explicit and timely warning and therefore are extremely difficult, if at all possible, to detect timely. Meanwhile, anomalous animal behaviours have been widely observed the day even several days before an Earthquake. Therefore, animals can be used as intelligent geo-sensors to tell or estimate when and where an earthquake will potentially occur. This paper presents a framework synthesizing crowdsourcing reports of anomalous animal behaviour from both active sources (designed mobile app and websites) and passive sources (social networks like Twitter, Facebook) for earthquake early prediction.”
“Urban stormwater utilities are increasingly using decentralized “green” infrastructure (GI) systems to capture stormwater and achieve compliance with regulations. Because environmental conditions, and design varies by GSI facility, monitoring of GSI systems under a range of conditions is essential. Conventional monitoring efforts can be costly because in-field data logging requires intense data transmission rates. The Internet of Things (IoT) can be used to more cost-effectively collect, store, and publish GSI monitoring data. Using 3G mobile networks, a cloud-based database was built on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 virtual machine to store and publish data collected with environmental sensors deployed in the field. This database can store multi-dimensional time series data, as well as photos and other observations logged by citizen scientists through a public engagement mobile app through a new Application Programming Interface (API). Also on the AWS EC2 virtual machine, a real-time QAQC flagging algorithm was developed to validate the sensor data streams.”
“Teaching is a big challenge to professors nowadays. To keep students interested at classes, they can use educational tools as Learning Animations. Besides that, the education must be egalitarian for all people, regardless of their disabilities, promoting accessibility. This work presents the formulation, development and evaluation of accessibility and usability in NetAnimations, a Computer Network Animation’s Mobile App.”
Mobile app for tourist services using artificial intelligence methodologies
“Applications for mobile devices have some restrictions because of the limited capabilities and heterogeneity of these devices. However, their communication capabilities allow the distribution of the application control and access to information in a network. If we also consider the changing environment when a user moves from one location to another, we should have software that is context-aware and able to adapt to new situations. Agent technology can support these requirements because of its distributed nature and the ability to combine flexible component architectures, some of them with planning and learning capabilities, which are appropriate for adapting to changing environments. In this project we show one such application, a mobile tourist guide service, which has been built as a multi-agent system, where some agents are deliberative and combine the Beliefs-Desires-Intentions approach with learning capabilities of Case Base Reasoning techniques.”
Releasing stress using music mood application: DeMuse
“Listening to music can reduce stress. This research is to study the development of music mood application called DeMuse. It mainly concerns with the users’ favorable and recommended music genre. In addition, DeMuse will be presented in health and fitness category of mood music based mobile application. In order to complete DeMuse, it will carry out the identification of the features for the particular mobile app (DeMuse), identification of the music and mood categories respectively. DeMuse will then equipped with the general features of music application and meditation purpose.”
Using iBeacon to detect user behavior from indoor physical movement
“In this paper, we present our work on user interest modeling using spatial behavioral data collected from indoor environments. Predicting user interests from their physical movement has a lot of important applications in contextual computing. We have critically reviewed the iBeacon technology and argued for its unique affordance in addressing human factor challenges in indoor contextual computing. We successfully applied iBeacon to model user’s spots of interest inside a physical building. In particular, we have developed an iBeacon-based mobile app to capture user’s indoor physical movement and collect their temporal feedback for comparison.”
“This study investigated the effects of three types of mobile design features on a consumers’ mobile app stickiness intention, as mediated by consumer’s emotional response (pleasure, arousal, and dominance).”
Autism and Web-Based Learning: Review and Evaluation of Web Apps
“Challenges with social skills are the main barrier of people with autism preventing them to be independent adults. However, information and communication technology can help individuals with autism by developing and practicing essential social skills. The objective of this research was reviewing and evaluating web apps for people with autism using Mobile App Rating Scale. The review used a set of free apps from Doctor TEA and Pictoaplicaciones. Based on these websites, a total of 65 apps were evaluated using Mobile App Rating Scale. The results showed that twenty-five apps had an acceptable quality with scores over four. Therefore, the use of these apps could be recommended for therapists, parents, and people with autism.”
“With the advancement of physical sensors and scientific modelling, we fortunately are able to track, monitor and even predict most of natural destructive forces, e.g. hurricanes and tornadoes. Compared to other natural disasters, earthquakes are particularly traumatic because they occur without explicit and timely warning and therefore are extremely difficult, if at all possible, to detect timely. Meanwhile, anomalous animal behaviours have been widely observed the day even several days before an Earthquake. Therefore, animals can be used as intelligent geo-sensors to tell or estimate when and where an earthquake will potentially occur. This paper presents a framework synthesizing crowdsourcing reports of anomalous animal behaviour from both active sources (designed mobile app and websites) and passive sources (social networks like Twitter, Facebook) for earthquake early prediction.”
Exercise is highly recommended by health professionals due to its numerous health benefits, yet little is known about the social factors that influence people’s motivation to exercise each day. Studies on social comparisons reveal that college women frequently evaluate their weight and shape compared to those around them through upward body-focused comparisons (i.e., comparing themselves to someone they perceive to be thinner or in better physical shape). Research suggests these comparisons can be driven by two different motivations, self-evaluation and self-improvement. However, the occurrence of these two different types of motivations in everyday life and how they may be associated with different levels of body dissatisfaction and exercise behaviors have yet to be examined in an ecologically valid study. The purpose of this study was to examine whether the way in which women seek and internalize daily upward body-focused social comparisons, in a self-evaluation or a self-improvement manner, is associated with different levels of body dissatisfaction, exercise intentions, and behaviors
Hunger and desire to eat in daily life
“Human food intake is subject to multiple influences in the current environment that is characterized by the all-time availability of tasty, cheap and energy-dense foods. As a result, non-homeostatic eating motives such as eating in the absence of hunger have gained prominence. Although it is well understood that hunger and craving often co-occur for main meals, the relative importance of both might differ for between-meal snacks, particularly in the afternoon/evening, suggesting a role of food types (macronutrients, ‘healthy foods’), and time of the day. Thus, the aim of the present studies was to examine daily (co-)fluctuations and dissociations in hunger and desire to eat, understood as indices of homeostatic and hedonic systems respectively, in a naturalistic setting using Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA).”
“Tobacco use is increasingly concentrated within marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ young adults. Developing tailored interventions to reduce tobacco-related health disparities requires understanding the mechanisms linking individual and contextual factors associated with tobacco use to behavior. This paper presents an in-depth exploration of three cases from a novel mixed method study designed to identify the situational factors and place-based practices of substance use among high-risk individuals.”
“This study investigates the momentary association between urban greenspace, captured using Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) derived from Landsat imagery, and psychological stress, captured using Geographic Ecological Momentary Assessment (GEMA), in the activity spaces of a sample of primarily African American adolescents residing in Richmond, Virginia.”
Deficient inhibitory control is predictive of increased alcohol consumption in the laboratory; however, little is known about this relationship in naturalistic, real-world settings.
Objectives: In the present study, we implemented ecological momentary assessment methods to investigate the relationship between inhibitory control and alcohol consumption in the real world.
Methods: Heavy drinkers who were motivated to reduce their alcohol consumption (N = 100) were loaned a smartphone which administered a stop signal task twice per day at random intervals between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. for 2 weeks. Each day, participants also recorded their planned and actual alcohol consumption and their subjective craving and mood. We hypothesised that day-to-day fluctuations in inhibitory control (stop signal reaction time) would predict alcohol consumption, over and above planned consumption and craving.
“This study contributes to the existing literature by 1) describing students’ daily in-person and virtual communication with parents during the beginning of college, 2) examining whether students’ daily virtual parental communication is associated with their same-day wellbeing, 3) testing whether daily virtual communication (i.e., enacted support) buffers daily responses to stressors, 4) examining the specificity of parental support (versus other sources of support), and 5) exploring whether the strength of students’ parental relationships (i.e., perceived support) is associated with students’ ‘reactivity’ to daily stressors. This dissertation consists of three studies that used daily assessments (i.e., ecological momentary assessments: EMA) and experimental manipulation to understand the momentary interplay between exposure to stressors, parent-child virtual communication, and students’ wellbeing during the transition to college.”
To examine the associations between high-fat/high-sugar foods (HFHS) and fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption and affective states in women.
Methods: The researchers used electronic ecological momentary assessment to capture HFHS and FV consumption in the past 2 hours (predictor) and current affective states (outcome) across 1 week among 202 women. Multilevel linear regression was conducted. Weight status was tested as a moderator.
Social support at work and at home: Dual-buffering effects in the work-family conflict process
“Using experience-sampling methodology, the present study offers a within-individual test of the buffering model of social support in the daily work-family conflict process. Building on the conceptualization of social support as a volatile resource, we examine how daily fluctuations in social support at work and at home influence the process through which work interferes with family life.”
“The United States has a weight problem. It’s not just about food intake but also about energy consumption [97, 153]. This dissertation asks: “How can we encourage people to act in ways that are mutually beneficial for themselves and the environment?” To date, there is no single behavior intervention in the literature targets behavioral changes containing both health and pro-environmental implications. Based on emerging knowledge from research in HCI, health communication, behavior interventions, psychology, pro-environmental psychology, habit formation (tiny habit theory), and experience sampling, this work describes the design and study of the EcoSante Lifestyle Intervention, a mobile behavior intervention app that engages participants with daily challenge prompts designed to engage health and environmental action simultaneously.”
“To facilitate a better understanding of the role of self-control capacity in self-control processes, we examined its variation at intraindividual and interindividual levels, and positioned it in a nomological network with core affect. In two experience sampling studies, 286 university students reported their self-control capacity and core affect for a week.”
“Urban stormwater utilities are increasingly using decentralized “green” infrastructure (GI) systems to capture stormwater and achieve compliance with regulations. Because environmental conditions, and design varies by GSI facility, monitoring of GSI systems under a range of conditions is essential. Conventional monitoring efforts can be costly because in-field data logging requires intense data transmission rates. The Internet of Things (IoT) can be used to more cost-effectively collect, store, and publish GSI monitoring data. Using 3G mobile networks, a cloud-based database was built on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 virtual machine to store and publish data collected with environmental sensors deployed in the field. This database can store multi-dimensional time series data, as well as photos and other observations logged by citizen scientists through a public engagement mobile app through a new Application Programming Interface (API). Also on the AWS EC2 virtual machine, a real-time QAQC flagging algorithm was developed to validate the sensor data streams”
Medical Topics
“Purpose: To determine, in a sample of community dwelling adults, the natural history of flare-ups in knee osteoarthritis (OA).”
A Double Masked Randomised Crossover Trial of two Silicone Hydrogel Multifocal Contact Lenses
“To compare visual performance and acceptance of two different designs of monthly disposable silicone hydrogel multifocal contact lenses, the Air Optix Aqua Multifocal and the Biofinity Multifocal.”
Bar-Ilan University b Ben-Gurion University of the Negev c Barnard College, Columbia University
“When we are accurate regarding our partners’ negative moods, are we seen as more responsive (and do we see them as such) as a function of the presence/absence of conflict? In two daily diary studies, empathic accuracy (EA) was assessed by comparing targets’ daily negative moods with perceivers’ inferences of these moods. We hypothesized that conflict will be associated with reductions in perceived partner responsiveness (PPR) for both parties; that on no-conflict days, EA will be positively associated with both parties’ PPR; that on conflict days, this positive association will be stronger for targets but will become negative for perceivers; and that regardless of conflict, overestimation (vs. underestimation) of negative moods will be tied with higher PPR for targets but with lower PPR for perceivers.”
“The transition to later-life caregiving roles, especially for couples caring for each other, can be rife with ambiguity. The incident discordance in spousal perceptions of one another’s role and its relationship to mental health outcomes have not been well-described.”
“Bone adapts to loading in several ways, including redistributing bone mass, and altered geometry and microarchitecture. Due to previous methodological limitations, it is not known how the bone material strength is affected by mechanical loading in humans.
The aim was to investigate the effect of 3‐month unilateral high‐impact exercise program on bone material properties and microarchitecture in healthy postmenopausal women.”
“The inFLUenza Patient Reported Outcome (FLU-PRO) measure is a daily diary assessing signs/symptoms of influenza across six body systems: Nose, Throat, Eyes, Chest/Respiratory, Gastrointestinal, Body/Systemic, developed and tested in adults with influenza. This study tested the reliability, validity, and responsiveness of FLU-PRO scores in adults with influenza-like illness (ILI).”
“To evaluate the efficacy and tolerability of a poly-herbal formulation, Herbagut, for the treatment of gastrointestinal symptoms and its effect on quality of life parameters in patients presenting with self-reported, unsatisfactory bowel habits.”
“Beyond asthma-related quality of life (QOL), limited data are available for relationships between asthma control status and patients’ subjective well-being. We assessed the associations of degree of asthma control with lung function and different aspects of well-being for patients with severe, uncontrolled asthma.”
“Patients with severe, uncontrolled asthma may experience symptoms that impair their ability to engage in activities and increase their perceived feelings of stress and tiredness. We evaluated treatment with the humanized, anti-eosinophilic monoclonal antibody benralizumab on asthma-related activity impairment, stress, and tiredness.”
Evaluation of NeuroPage as a memory aid for people with multiple sclerosis: A randomised controlled trial
“Memory problems are reported in 40%–60% of people with multiple sclerosis (MS). These problems affect independence and may limit the ability to benefit from rehabilitation. Our aim was to evaluate the effectiveness of NeuroPage for people with MS living in the community.”
Evaluation of bowel habits in benign anorectal diseases
“Evaluation of bowel habit is useful indicator of functional gastrointestinal disorders. Assessment of bowel habit is retrospective in nature and it is best done by questionnaire technique. Aims and objectives of the study was to look for the bowel habit in common benign anorectal disorder.”
Modeling neurocognitive reaction time with gamma distribution
“As a broader effort to build a holistic biopsychosocial health metric, reaction time data obtained from participants undertaking neurocognitive tests; have been examined using Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) for assessing its distribution. Many of the known existing methods assume, that the reaction time data follows a Gaussian distribution and thus commonly use statistical measures such as Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) for analysis. However, it is not mandatory for the reaction time data, to necessarily follow Gaussian distribution and in many instances, it can be better modeled by other representations such as Gamma distribution. Unlike Gaussian distribution which is defined using mean and variance, the Gamma distribution is defined using shape and scale parameters which also considers higher order moments of data such as skewness and kurtosis. Generalized Linear Models (GLM), based on the family exponential distributions such as Gamma distribution, which have been used to model reaction time in other domains, have not been fully explored for modeling reaction time data in psychology domain. While limited use of Gamma distribution have been reported [5, 17, 21], for analyzing response times, their application has been somewhat ad-hoc rather than systematic. For this proposed research, we use a real life biopsychosocial dataset, generated from the ‘digital health’ intervention programs conducted by the Faculty of Health, Federation University, Australia.”
Healthcare monitoring system using IoT
“Health-related issues have been regarded as one of the main problems which directly impact quality of life of a person and development of the nation. Avoidance of healthcare monitoring negatively results in many aspects. Among the extensive applications enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT), digital health care is a mainly essential one. Internet of Things (IoT) provides a new life to the healthcare field. One of the better ways is where the doctors are able to certainly and quickly use the relevant patient information through the help of internet of things to take suitable actions. This tremendously improves the quality of information and the patient care in the Medical field. So, Internet of Things offers a concrete platform to connect all the resources and improve the quality of life. The proposed system presents a personal healthcare system that is both flexible and scalable.”
A Novel High Tech Approach to Monitor the Pharmacotherapy of Alzheimer: a Narrative Review
“Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a multisystem and multifactor disease with a long no-symptom stage, hence likely not modeled by one or even a few models and very likely not be treated by a single drug. We propose that a more effective approach to use fMRI as a still emerging, repeatable and non- invasive neuroimaging tools that can be very useful for evaluating, diagnosis, treatment and drugs- development.”
Fourth generation technologies in pharmaceuticals-Revolutionizing healthcare
“The pharmaceutical industry, being a highly regulated industry, has been slow to adopt innovation. However, as a result of spiralling costs and an increasing mandate to control the same, as well as an increasing cognizance of the need to drive patient centricity, pharma has opened the doors to innovation. Fourth generation technologies, ranging from ‘earables’ to ‘digital pills’, ‘genomicbased AI augmented trials’ and ‘AI- driven drug disovery’, ‘virtual reality and virtual clinical trials’, pharma has come a long way. Yet challenges related to interoperability, data security, data privacy, data ownership and data sharing pose hurdles to this path. This paper explores how fourth generation technologies are disrupting pharma and healthcare and empowering the patient.”
A Novel High Tech Approach to Monitor the Pharmacotherapy of Alzheimer: a Narrative Review
“Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a multisystem and multifactor disease with a long no-symptom stage, hence likely not modeled by one or even a few models and very likely not be treated by a single drug. We propose that a more effective approach to use fMRI as a still emerging, repeatable and non- invasive neuroimaging tools that can be very useful for evaluating, diagnosis, treatment and drugs- development.”
“Low birth rate and the long life expectancy represent an explosive mixture, resulting in the rapid aging of population. The costs of healthcare in the grey society are increasing dramatically, and soon there will be not enough resources and people for care. This context requires conceptually new elderly care solutions progressively reducing the percentages of the human-based care. Research on robot-based solutions for elderly care and active ageing aims to answer these needs. From a general perspective, robotics has the power to completely reshape the landscape of healthcare both in its structure and its operation. In fact, the long-term sustainability of healthcare systems could be addressed by automation powered by digital health technologies, such as artificial intelligence, 3D-printing or robotics. The latter could take over monotonous work from healthcare workers, which would allow them to focus more on patients and to have lesser workload. Robots might be used in elder care with several different aims. (i) Robots may act as caregivers, i.e. assist the elderly, (ii) they can provide remainders and instructions for activities of daily life and safety, and/or assist their carers in daily tasks; (iii) they can help monitor their behaviour and health; and (iv) provide companionship, including entertainment and hobbies, reminiscence and social contact.”
“An aspect of the present disclosure relates to an integrated digital health system that includes a smart dosage delivery device connected to a smart appliance and/or a cloud/server. The integrated digital health system primarily includes a smart dosage delivery device that can offer dosing and/or patient interactivity and can connect to a smart appliance and/or a cloud/server to transmit information pertaining to dosage and various health related parameters. The smart appliance and/or cloud/server can include a big data application that can offer analytics and visualization tools to gain insights into customer and patients needs and wants.”
Patient-owned electronic health records system and method
“Embodiments of the invention provide a personal digital health portfolio system including a computer system coupled to a source of patient medical records or patient data with accessibility controlled by a secure authenticator structured for an uploader, downloader or reviewer of the patient medical records or patient data. An application programming interface (API) in data communication with a processor of the computer system can upload, download, or enable access of patient medical records or patient data stored on a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium. An interface of the source of patient medical records or patient data can read and transfer the patient medical records or patient data under control of a second entity via the API. A digital gateway is coupled to provide secure distributed access of the patient medical records or patient data stored from the non-transitory computer-readable storage medium to a doctor, pharmacy, health service, or insurance company.”
“An estimated 70% of newborn lives could be saved globally if evidence-based interventions were successfully implemented. The ‘NeoTree’ application (app) addresses the need for quality care for sick newborns in resource-poor settings, particularly where care is nurse-led, by providing an integrated electronic platform for three functions;
1) immediate digital data capture on admission,
2) clinical decision support according to evidence-based clinical guidelines, and
3) newborn education. Here, we develop the first two functions and test the acceptability, feasibility and usability of The NeoTree in a district hospital, Malawi.”
“Screening for colorectal cancer (CRC) reduces mortality, yet more than one third of age-eligible Americans are unscreened.
Objective:To examine the effect of a digital health intervention, Mobile Patient Technology for Health–CRC (mPATH-CRC), on rates of CRC screening.”
“Treatment of hyperglycemia in women with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is associated with improved maternal and neonatal outcomes and requires intensive clinical input. This is currently achieved by hospital clinic attendance every 2 to 4 weeks with limited opportunity for intervention between these visits.”
Digital Cross-Channel Usability Heuristics: Improving the Digital Health Experience.
“This paper proposes a process to identify and prioritize user task and channel relationships with a set of newly developed CC heuristics applied to these priority needs. This process is in the context of a digital public health program. Although this approach was developed from a public health perspective, it can be applicable to a wide range of public and commercial digital services or products.”
Using Digital Health to Enable Integration for Elderly Residents in Aged Care Facilities
“Secure exchange of health information is a core foundation of Australia’s expanding digital health program and is being promoted by the Sydney North Primary Health Network (SNPHN) for increasing use in the region’s Residential Aged Care Facilities (RACFs).
The GRACEMED study1 identified less than 10% of residents’ medication charts matched the records of their treating GP, and suggested that improving use of digital systems to support clinical handover could improve patient safety. SNPHN is exploring ways in which My Health Record (MyHR) and secure message delivery (SMD) could be used to facilitate the increasingly complex nature of care in RACFs.”
Topology Design and Cross-layer Optimization for Wireless Body Sensor Networks
“Wireless Body Sensor Networks play a crucial role in digital health care nowadays. Due to the size limitation on the sensor nodes and the life critical characteristics of the signals, there are stringent requirements on network’s reliability and energy efficiency. In this article, we propose a mathematical optimization problem that jointly considers network topology design and cross-layer optimization in WBSNs. We introduce multilevel primal and dual decomposition methods and manage to solve the proposed non-convex mixed-integer optimization problem. A solution with fast convergence rate based on binary search is provided. Simulation results have been supplemented to show that our proposed method yields much better performance than existing solutions.”
Designing and Evaluating mHealth Interventions for Vulnerable Populations: A Systematic Review
“Diverse disciplines, including Human-Computer Interaction have explored how mobile health (mHealth) applications can transform healthcare and health promotion. Increasingly, research has explored how mHealth tools can promote healthy behaviors within vulnerable populations—groups that disproportionately experience barriers to wellness.”
Exploring Digital Health Use and Opinions of University Students: Field Survey Study
“During university, students face some potentially serious health risks, and their lifestyle can have a direct effect on health and health behaviors later in life. Concurrently, university students are digital natives having easy access to the internet and new technologies. Digital health interventions offer promising new opportunities for health promotion, disease prevention, and care in this specific population. The description of the current use of and opinions on digital health among university students can inform future digital health strategies and interventions within university settings.”
Managing health IT risks: reflections and recommendations
“Health information technology (IT) offers exciting opportunities for providing novel services to patients, and for improving the quality and safety of care. However, the introduction of IT can lead to unintended consequences, and create opportunities for failure, which can have significant effects on patient safety. In this paper I argue that many health IT patient safety risks are probably quite predictable, but are often not considered at the time. This puts patients at risk, and it threatens the successful adoption of health IT. I recommend that healthcare providers focus on strengthening their processes for organisational learning, promote proactive risk management strategies, and make risk management decisions transparent and explicit.”
How Wearable Computing Is Shaping Digital Health
“Wearable computing enables more personalized healthcare through a distributed information sharing model that puts patients and users rather than providers, insurers, and other industry stakeholders at the center. It also fosters the creation of new health knowledge and more effective prevention and treatment techniques by integrating vital-sign data, health-related behavioral data, and environmental-exposure data with clinical and genetic data. Realizing the promise of wearables and digital health, however, will require multiple parallel technological advances.”
“Health is a major concern of today’s age. The development of information technology and computing changes the entire arena of life and the gradual development became responsible for the emergence of Digital Society. Information Technology is about the collection, selection, organization, processing, management and dissemination of information and similar contents viz. data and knowledge. For this task and affairs, several information technological tools have been used and it is increasing rapidly. Today it is very difficult to find out an area where utilization of information technology is absence. Hence healthcare is not an exception. Digital Health becomes an important concept these days for the creation of digital health and medical contents. Similar to other areas like Digital Business, Digital Marketing, Digital Education, Digital Health become a concept and key strategy for the development and modernization of healthcare affairs powered by Information Science and Technology. The integration and combination of information technology and computing create a separate domain and branch called ‘Health Information Science’. However, it is important to note that it is also known as Health Informatics nomenclature in the line of UK based academic units. Initially, the branch was mainly popular in the western countries and developed countries but gradually it is rising as a branch of study in a country like India. Private universities in India are rapidly increasing and the growth, initiative of private initiative is noticeable. This paper is conceptual in nature and deals with aspects of Health Informatics including its growing trends as a program of study in private universities in India.”
“There is a need for systems to dynamically interact with ageing populations to gather information, monitor health condition and provide support, especially after hospital discharge or at-home settings. Several smart devices have been delivered by digital health, bundled with telemedicine systems, smartphone and other digital services. While such solutions offer personalised data and suggestions, the real disruptive step comes from the interaction of new digital ecosystem, represented by chatbots. Chatbots will play a leading role by embodying the function of a virtual assistant and bridging the gap between patients and clinicians. Powered by AI and machine learning algorithms, chatbots are forecasted to save healthcare costs when used in place of a human or assist them as a preliminary step of helping to assess a condition and providing self-care recommendations. This paper describes integrating chatbots into telemedicine systems intended for elderly patient after their hospital discharge. The paper discusses possible ways to utilise chatbots to assist healthcare providers and support patients with their condition.”
“Wearable fitness devices have the potential to address some of the most challenging public health problems in the United States. But they also raise serious privacy concerns. The data they collect can be combined with personal information from other sources, raising the specter of discriminatory profiling, manipulative marketing, and data breaches. Yet, these devices fall between the cracks of a weak health privacy and a consumer protection system in the United States.”
“Wearable fitness devices have the potential to address some of the most challenging public health problems in the United States. But they also raise serious privacy concerns. The data they collect can be combined with personal information from other sources, raising the specter of discriminatory profiling, manipulative marketing, and data breaches. Yet, these devices fall between the cracks of a weak health privacy and a consumer protection system in the United States. This article offers key principles and critical issues that must be considered in order to develop effective privacy, equity, and consumer protections for the emerging digital health marketplace.”
“Today, patients can use their wearable or IoT devices to report data of physiological parameters and track their own health records. IoT wearable technology has been embedded with software and sensors to create a connected network that collect and exchange data. Advances in digital health have fundamentally changed the business model of the pharmaceutical industry, and has impacted all aspects of a pharma company’s structure—from sales and marketing, to R&D and business-to-business activities. As healthcare becomes more digitized, pharma companies are transforming to remain competitive by rethinking their business and operating models, their cultures and capabilities, and adopting policies that nurture innovation and courageousstrategic moves.”
“The increasing incidence of type 2 diabetes mellitus presents as a tsunami of health problems and health care costs. Preventing this development needs to target the underlying rise in metabolic syndrome cases through obesity and unhealthy lifestyle. Obesity is frequently perceived as a social issue with implicit psychological strain; health apps/weight-reduction programs are mushrooming from this side. The present program intends to bring weight reduction into the hands of HCPs by utilizing advanced digital technology.”
Information Technology: A Neural Network for Reliable Healthcare
“Health information technology (IT) functions like a neural network to connect digital health stakeholders and foster transparency for reliable healthcare. It is a key enabler of healthcare’s triple aims of improving the patient experience (including quality and satisfaction), improving population health, and reducing the per capita healthcare costs. In this chapter, we discuss technological advances and trends in health IT over recent years that are expected to affect future healthcare delivery and power new models of value-based care. Specifically, we discuss the adoption of the electronic health record (EHR) as core health IT, the importance of interoperability as an innovation accelerator, the use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) and barcodes to ensure patient safety, and patient engagement and experience technology.”
Knowledge Brokering in a Zambian Rural Health Setting: A case of Chitambo District.
“The establishment of an emergency care resource centre in September 2015 by the Friends of Chitambo project is part of the effort to sustain health knowledge use in the health Knowledge network in Chitambo District. The authors in our capacity as health librarians (Knowledge Brokers) empirically observe the perceived benefits of improving access to relevant health knowledge (Knowledge Brokering) of health care workers at Chitambo Mission Hospital.”
“With the growing population of older adults as a potential user group of mHealth, the need increases for mHealth interventions to address specific aging characteristics of older adults. The existence of aging barriers to computer use is widely acknowledged. Yet, usability studies show that mHealth still fails to be appropriately designed for older adults and their expectations. To enhance designs of mHealth aimed at older adult populations, it is essential to gain insight into aging barriers that impact the usability of mHealth as experienced by these adults.”
“Mobile applications (apps) are promising tools to support chronic disease screening and linkage to health services. They have the potential to increase healthcare access for vulnerable populations. The HealthNavigator app was developed to provide chronic disease risk assessments, linkage to local general practitioners (GPs) and lifestyle programs, and a personalised health report for discussion with a GP. Assessments were either self-administered or facilitated by community health workers through a Primary Health Network (PHN) initiative targeting ethnically diverse communities”
“To describe the latest evidence of effectiveness and impact of networked communication interventions for young people with mental health conditions. Done by searching five databases from 2009 onwards, we included studies of any design investigating two-way communication interventions for the treatment of young people (mean age 12–25) with a chronic mental health disorder. The data were synthesised using narrative summary.”
eHealth for interdisciplinary practice: is it delivering on its promise?
“Our research in brief: Interdisciplinary eHealth The promise: eHealth has the potential to transform interdisciplinary practice by fostering improved collaboration across health providers and consumers. The reality: We heard from health professionals working in traumatic brain injury (TBI) rehabilitation that they face major barriers in their use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in health care. They attempt to make the most of less-than-ideal eHealth systems but successful use is usually constrained to within their own workplace. With modern healthcare requiring collaboration across many providers and sectors, health professionals are often disconnected from achieving the quality that strive for in their work. The future: By addressing sources of disconnection routinely faced by health professionals, we are confident that eHealth can enable interdisciplinary practice that delivers safe, quality healthcare.”
Information Architecture of Web-Based Interventions to Improve Health Outcomes: Systematic Review
“The rise in usage of and access to new technologies in recent years has led to a growth in digital health behavior change interventions. As the shift to digital platforms continues to grow, it is increasingly important to consider how the field of information architecture (IA) can inform the development of digital health interventions. IA is the way in which digital content is organized and displayed, which strongly impacts users’ ability to find and use content. While many information architecture best practices exist, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the role it plays in influencing behavior change and health outcomes.”
‘Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) which enable people to access, use and promote health information through digital technology, promise important health systems innovations which can challenge gatekeepers’ control of information, through processes of disintermediation. College students, in pursuit of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information, are particularly affected by gatekeeping as strong social and cultural norms restrict their access to information and services. This paper examines mobile phone usage for obtaining health information in Mirzapur, Bangladesh. It contrasts college students’ usage with that of the general population, asks whether students are using digital technologies for health information in innovative ways, and examines how gender affects this.”
“Understanding teenagers’ preferences for contraceptive method attributes and how that relates to their method choice is very important and not well understood. According to new studies nearly 85% of teenagers turn to internet-related digital health resources for health information. Digital health advisors are novel ways to deliver health information to teenagers. Tia is one such mobile application that helps women make informed reproductive health decisions. A core feature of this app is a birth control recommendation algorithm that provides women personalized birth control recommendations. Users can indicate their first and second most important personal preferences. Preference options include effectiveness, non-daily method, acne reduction, menstrual suppression, non-hormonal methods, absence of procedure, hidden method and having regular monthly cycles.”
Design and Development of Intelligent Electrodes for Future Digital Health Monitoring: A Review
“Electrodes are sensors used in electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring system to diagnose heart diseases. Over the years, diverse types of electrodes have been designed and developed to improve ECG monitoring system. However, more recently, with the technological advances and capabilities from the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and data analytics in personalized healthcare, researchers are attempting to design and develop more effective as well as flexible ECG devices by using intelligent electrodes. This paper reviews previous works on electrodes used in electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring devices to identify the key ftures for designing and developing intelligent electrodes in digital health monitoring devices.”
Managerial capabilities to address digital business models: The case of digital health
“The full digitization of products and services coupled with advanced analytics impacts the dynamics of BMs and requires entrepreneurs to adapt their managerial capabilities to meet new challenges regarding customer needs, regulations, and privacy. Our research shows that the three main kinds of managerial capabilities required of entrepreneurs are: information technology (IT) capabilities for internal issues, strategic capabilities for external issues, and BM‐specific capabilities to manage the in/out interface. This research underlines the challenges of managing network effects, value appropriation, and sensitive information in the digital health industry.”
A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF WIRED MAGAZINE IN TERMS OF SELF-TRACKING DEVICES
“In the digital era that we live in now it is possible to gather biological and biographical data of an individual by wearable digital health and activity-tracking devices. The phenomenon is known as self-tracking and it intends to expand individual’s self-knowledge and as a result to improve both the physical and psychological health. By self-tracking applications that digital health and activity-tracking devices provide now we can measure diverse biodata from heart rate, body fat percentage and pain levels to miles run, calories eaten and even to mood and happiness levels. The aim of this paper is the analysis of growing digitalized self-tracking trend through a content analysis of Wired magazine. This well-known design and technology magazine monthly publishes in print and online technology related articles on how emerging technologies affect culture, economy and politics and it reaches online more than 30 million people each month through wired.com, digital edition. This present study, carries out a content analysis of all the issues until December 2016 through the term ‘self-tracking’ and also two other closely related terms: ‘quantified self’ and ‘lifelogging’. In the analysis, the usage period and popularity of these three terms; their relation network with the main topics and the sub-topics of the magazine are examined. By this analysis, the study presents the scope and relevance of the rising trend of self-tracking technologies from the birth of this trend.”
“Rationale Digital health interventions have demonstrated positive impacts on clinical outcomes in asthma, but data on their impact in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and among older populations, have been limited. To assess feasibility, we evaluated the number of participants that enrolled and synced a sensor to initiate data transmission, and the duration of active participation.”
Panoptic Parenting: The Biopedagogies of Wearable Infant Monitors
“Wearable infant physiologic monitors have become a new frontier in the proliferation of digital health tracking devices. Technological advances have made the devices less invasive and spurred rapid industry growth (King, 2014). Bonafide, Jamison, and Foglia (2017) observed: Smartphone applications (apps) integrated with sensors built into socks, onesies, buttons, leg bands, and diaper clips have the capability to display infants’ respirations, pulse rate, and blood oxygen saturation, and to generate alarms for apnea, tachycardia, bradycardia, and desaturation. (p. 353) However, medical professionals have critiqued the safety, accuracy, and effectiveness of these devices. I investigate how the rhetoric of infant health trackers creates a biopedagogy of resistance to medical expertise by normalizing and pathologizing maternal anxiety, while positioning digital surveillance as a rational response to ambiguous risk.”
“Cross-sector partnerships benefit public health by leveraging ideas, resources, and expertise from a wide range of partners. In this study we documented the process and impact of AIR Louisville (a collaboration forged among the Louisville Metro Government, a nonprofit institute, and a technology company) in successfully tackling a complex public health challenge: asthma. We enrolled residents of Louisville, Kentucky, with asthma and used electronic inhaler sensors to monitor where and when they used medication.”
Big Data for Public Health Policy-Making: Policy Empowerment
Digitization is considered to radically transform healthcare. As such, with seemingly unlimited opportunities to collect data, it will play an important role in the public health policy-making process. In this context, health data cooperatives (HDC) are a key component and core element for public health policy-making and for exploiting the potential of all the existing and rapidly emerging data sources. Being able to leverage all the data requires overcoming the computational, algorithmic, and technological challenges that characterize today’s highly heterogeneous data landscape, as well as a host of diverse regulatory, normative, governance, and policy constraints. The full potential of big data can only be realized if data are being made accessible and shared. Treating research data as a public good, creating HDC to empower citizens through citizen-owned health data, and allowing data access for research and the development of new diagnostics, therapies, and public health policies will yield the transformative impact of digital health. The HDC model for data governance is an arrangement, based on moral codes, that encourages citizens to participate in the improvement of their own health. This then enables public health institutions and policymakers to monitor policy changes and evaluate their impact and risk on a population level.”
The digital patient: the future of mobile health for respiratory patients
“The wave of digital health is continuously growing and promises to transform healthcare and optimize the patients’ experience. Asthma is in the center of these digital developments, as it is a chronic disease that requires the continuous attention of both health care professionals and patients themselves. The accurate and timely assessment of the state of asthma is the fundamental basis of digital health approaches and is also the most significant factor toward the preventive and efficient management of the disease. Furthermore, the necessity of inhaled medication offers a basic platform upon which modern technologies can be integrated, namely the inhaler device itself. Inhaler based monitoring devices were introduced in the beginning of the 1980s and have been evolving but mainly for the assessment of medication adherence. As technology progresses and novel sensing components are becoming available, the enhancement of inhalers with a wider range of monitoring capabilities holds the promise to further support and optimize asthma self-management. The current paper aims to take a step for the mapping of this territory and start the discussion among healthcare professionals and engineers for the identification and the development of technologies that can offer personalized asthma self-management with clinical significance. In this direction, a technical review of inhaler based monitoring devices is presented, together with an overview of their use in clinical research.”
“Managing cardiometabolic conditions (diabetes, hypertension, and dyslipidemia) is challenging for patients and physicians. Patients often lack the understanding and motivation to adopt healthy behaviors and adhere to treatment plans. Physicians face the challenge of having limited time to engage and educate patients at the point-of-care. Electronic health records (EHRs) have not solved this problem; in fact, reports suggest that EHRs increase administrative tasks, reducing time with patients and contributing to burnout. To address these issues we developed CM-SHARE, a web-based application that provides physicians and patients a dashboard of critical health information needed at the point of care, actionable cues to address guideline-based care and quality gaps, and visual tools to educate patients.”
“There are currently many diabetes apps available, but there is limited evidence demonstrating clinical impact. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of a diabetes mobile app with in-app coaching by a certified diabetes educator on glycemic control for individuals with type 2 diabetes.”
An Information System to Remotely Monitor Oncological Palliative Care Patients
“For oncological patients, the introduction of palliative care in the early stages of the disease’s progression can have great benefits. The Portuguese government recently introduced a program to provide home palliative care support by creating specialized mobile teams, able to track, visit and address the patients’ problems. These teams must be available for the patient, when necessary and if necessary. The teams must also have updated knowledge about the daily evolution of the patients’ health.”
“To develop and validate a tool for assessing dietitians’ self-efficacy with using mobile health (mHealth) apps in dietetic practice.”
“mHealth tools to help people manage chronic illnesses have surged in popularity, but evidence of their effectiveness remains mixed. The aim of this study was to address a gap in the mHealth and health psychology literatures by investigating how individual differences in psychological traits are associated with mHealth effectiveness. Drawing from regulatory mode theory, we tested the role of locomotion and assessment in explaining why mHealth tools are effective for some but not everyone.”
Monitoring Energy Balance in Breast Cancer Survivors Using a Mobile App: Reliability Study
“The majority of breast cancer survivors do not meet recommendations in terms of diet and physical activity. To address this problem, we developed a mobile health (mHealth) app for assessing and monitoring healthy lifestyles in breast cancer survivors, called the Energy Balance on Cancer (BENECA) mHealth system. The BENECA mHealth system is a novel and interactive mHealth app, which allows breast cancer survivors to engage themselves in their energy balance monitoring. BENECA was designed to facilitate adherence to healthy lifestyles in an easy and intuitive way.”
Evaluating an mHealth App for Health and Well-Being at Work: Mixed-Method Qualitative Study
“To improve workers’ health and well-being, workplace interventions have been developed, but utilization and reach are unsatisfactory, and effects are small. In recent years, new approaches such as mobile health (mHealth) apps are being developed, but the evidence base is poor. Research is needed to examine its potential and to assess when, where, and for whom mHealth is efficacious in the occupational setting. To develop interventions for workers that actually will be adopted, insight into user satisfaction and technology acceptance is necessary. For this purpose, various qualitative evaluation methods are available.”
“Congestive Heart failure (CHF) is a major health issue affecting 6.5 million people in the U.S. alone. Current reimbursement policies use readmission rates and length of hospital stays as indicators of quality of care. This project aimed to improve patients’ self-monitoring practices post-hospital discharge, quickly identify critical warning signs, decrease readmissions and reduce healthcare costs by integrating remote monitoring ePRO and connected devices into standard outpatient care practices.”
“The Brief Pain Inventory-short form (BPI-sf) is widely used in self-reported pain assessment, incorporates pain numeric rating scales (NRS) and is commonly utilized in electronic format in clinical trials, however, there is no published information about its usability as an electronic patient-reported outcome (ePRO) measure. The objective of this qualitative study was threefold: 1) to better understand pain experiences among patients with pleural or peritoneal mesothelioma; 2) to assess the interpretability of the instructions, item stem, recall period, and response option of the “worst pain” item of the BPI-sf; and 3) to examine the usability of the TrialMax Touch™ (CRF Health, Inc., Plymouth Meeting, PA) screen-based handheld device and the electronic format of the BPI-sf in a sub-sample of pleural mesothelioma patients.”
5PSQ-131 Mobile applications to check drug interactions: qualitative and quantitative analysis
“The number of medical apps has increased exponentially in recent years, with more than 2 30 000 available.
Because of the lack of regulation, some of these apps may offer inaccurate content or may not reach the minimum quality standards in order to be used by healthcare professionals. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the availability of drug interaction checker apps for mobile devices and their quality according to the Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS score).”
“Dementia, Autism, and Alzheimer’s disorders affect millions of people worldwide. Suffering from forgetfulness, affected patients tend to wander off and potentially get into dangerous situations. This work develops the Alzimio mobile app, to provide safety functions to these patients; including safe-zone geofencing, activity-based alarms, take-me-home, navigate to nearest friend, and check-on-me. Six main design goals guided the design of Alzimio, including periodic safety checks, refined user control, flexibility and efficiency of alarms, and optimized operation, among others. Providing reliable continuous sensing and operation without drastically affecting battery lifetime provided a challenge.”
Enhance wound healing monitoring through a thermal imaging based smartphone app
“In this paper, we present a thermal imaging based app to augment traditional appearance based wound growth monitoring. Accurate diagnose and track of wound healing enables physicians to effectively assess, document, and individualize the treatment plan given to each wound patient. Currently, wounds are primarily examined by physicians through visual appearance and wound area. However, visual information alone cannot present a complete picture on a wound’s condition. In this paper, we use a smartphone attached thermal imager and evaluate its effectiveness on augmenting visual appearance based wound diagnosis.”
“Mobile Apps are deeply entering in daily lives and could be also used for e-learning/e-training purpose. The realisation of a Mobile App, designed for iOS, would allow a wide spread of such tools, even among the medical community. However, several key points should be faced to build up a reliable product for this purpose, among which the implementation of accurate, reproducible methods to perform measurements on biomedical images. To this extent, a new approach for computing distances on biomedical images was developed and the results obtained with this approach were comparable to the ones achieved with more complex systems. Such result could foster the implementation of more complex functions and Apps devoted to healthcare professionals in various fields.”
HealthTalks-A Mobile App to Improve Health Communication and Personal Information Management
“A patient’s health literacy has a direct impact on their health, but more than a third of the USA population has “basic” or “below basic” levels of health literacy. An individual’s wellbeing is also affected by the communication with their physician, as the use of technical terminology may hinder the patient’s understanding. A patient’s ability to, later on, recall or retrieve helpful information could reduce these comprehension problems and this can be improved by a good management of personal health information. To help overcome some of these problems, we created HealthTalks, a mobile app that empowers the patients, easing their daily health tasks and self-care ability. It does so by recording the audio of a medical appointment, transcribing its dialogue, giving more information about medical concepts employed, and allowing information associated with medical appointments to be easily managed by the patient.”
Smart self-regulatory health system
“Healthcare industry has proven its technically abundant applications at par other industries with the help of many concepts like IoT and cloud computing. It has transformed its techniques by using intelligent gadgets that can be acquainted with patients in different configurations. The data obtained from devices like pulse rate monitors, weighing scales, blood glucose measuring devices, etc. is to be stocked and tracked as awareness of health statistics is vital for all. A hefty portion of these measures requires a follow-off with a specialist. This commences the preference of using IoT based smart devices to deliver more valuable data to the patient and drop off the necessity for direct patient-doctor interaction. Improving the standard of service, it brings particularly high value for the patients requiring constant supervision and quick data access and analysis.”
Optimized walking straight guidance system for visually impaired person that use Android smartphone
“A person with visual organs problems whose often called visually impaired person, either total or partial blindness has obstacles in doing motor activities, especially activities that require a person to move from a place to another such as walking have a veering tendency. This problem can risk the safety of the visually impaired person when walking in public area. The need for a system that can help people with special needs is felt important enough to support ease of activity for these people. This research proposes a mobile app based system to guide someone to walk straight using the motion sensors on the smartphone and audio-based guidance.”
Development of a 3D printed stethoscope for virtual cardiac auscultation examination training
“Cardiac auscultation allows diagnosing the heart by listening to its sounds. Current cardiac auscultation training is seeing a preference towards diagnostics equipment such as the echocardiograph that allows visualizing and listening to the heart to determine how the heart is working, rather than the use of the stethoscope which only provides auditory feedback, resulting in a loss of stethoscope-based cardiac auscultation skills which are relevant in situations where it is the only cost-effective option available. Currently, virtual reality, simulation, and games are taking a prominent role in medical training, providing consumer-level immersive and interactive realistic experiences. Within these fields, user interfaces can provide more appropriate forms of interactions for developing cognitive and psychomotor skills. However, traditional controllers are widely employed and do not map adequately the functionality of real medical equipment, including the stethoscope. In this paper, we present the development of a 3D printed stethoscope prototype for practicing virtual cardiac auscultation examination training with a mobile app.”
A mobile app for patients with Pompe disease and its possible clinical applications
“In the last years, the potential of smart technology to provide innovative solutions for disease management has raised high expectations for patients’ and healthcare professionals community.
We developed a mobile app, called AIGkit, specifically designed for adult patients with Pompe disease, with the aim to help them to manage burden of illness-related factors, and also to provide clinicians with continuous tracking of each patient at real-time and ecological conditions of everyday life. Here, we present the AIGkit as an innovative approach exploiting cutting-edge technology to improve quality of care and research on neuromuscular disorders.”
“This analysis assessed changes over time in skill and knowledge related to the use of evidence‐based practices associated with quality of maternal and neonatal care during a nurse midwife mentoring intervention at primary health clinics (PHCs) in Bihar, India. Nurse midwife mentors (NMMs) entered live birth observation data into a mobile App from 320 PHCs. The NMMs completed prompted questions in the App after every live birth witnessed. The App consisted of questions around three main themes, “What went well?”, “What needed improvement?” and “What can be done differently next time?””
Managing orthodontic needs through mobile apps
“To conduct a review of current mobile orthodontic apps available on Apple and Google Play stores in order to understand the integration of mobile app technology in orthodontic needs. The mobile orthodontic apps were searched on respective app stores of Apple and Google Play on two devices namely Apple iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge Smartphone up to 11/01/2018. English language apps directly related to orthodontics were included whereas general, dental, non-health, individual orthodontic practice, conference apps and non-English apps were excluded. Forty-nine apps met our review criteria. Nine apps on Apple, 22 apps on Google play stores and 18 apps in both stores. The apps are divided into clinician, clinician/patient and practise centred apps. The review highlights the need for developing educative tools that support the use of orthodontic apps which might have an impact on patient’s health, compliance, financial and regulatory barriers. Professional groups, universities or developers in medical fields with access to updated information can create apps suiting the wider requirements of orthodontic care and management. The apps reviewed are effective and provide information and support to the patient yet lack certain features of interaction and fail to highlight the importance of orthodontic treatment.”
Development of RTOs Based Internet Connected Baby Monitoring System
“This paper focused a web connected baby monitoring that streams live camera videos and very important data concerning the encircling setting and creates it out there on the online. this helps the parents to watch the baby from anyplace at any time, whether or not within the next area or off from home. The device is often unbroken physically at a secure distance off from the baby. All the parents must to do is to own a connected device like a Smartphone or a computer with a web browser. There’s no must to install and maintain a separate mobile app. the device acts as an online server associated connects to the net over a local area network affiliation. The microcontroller runs on high of associate RTOS to attain this.”
A 3-day electronic bladder diary as an app for smart-phone: Validation study
“The use of electronic bladder diaries (BD) may have advantages such as intuitive data entry or reducing calculation time. As the use of smart-phones is spread world-wide, we designed an easy to use electronic BD (eDM3d©) as a mobile app based on the already Spanish validated 3-day BD (DM3d©), which includes a frequency-volume chart, urgency episodes, urgency intensity (PPIUS scale), incontinence episodes and fluid intake (Jimenez-Cidre et al, 2015). Interface obtained consisted in only 4 buttons (micturition, intake, wake-up, sleep) that had to be clicked to create an event. Our aim was to validate the eDM3d© through its comparison with the paper DM3d©.”
A Mobile App (BEDSide Mobility) to Support Nurses’ Tasks at the Patient’s Bedside: Usability Study
“The introduction of clinical information systems has increased the amount of clinical documentation. Although this documentation generally improves patient safety, it has become a time-consuming task for nurses, which limits their time with the patient. On the basis of a user-centered methodology, we have developed a mobile app named BEDSide Mobility to support nurses in their daily workflow and to facilitate documentation at the bedside. The aim of the study was to assess the usability of the BEDSide Mobility app in terms of the navigation and interaction design through usability testing.”
Enhanced Navigation Cane for Visually Impaired
“Vision is an important aspect of brain functionality as it allows us to view our surroundings, and maintain the incisiveness of our mind. For a blind person, to walk without resistance, is the most difficult task. Visually impaired are compelled to depend on others for conducting daily activities, especially walk outdoor. As a humanitarian service, our paper aims to help the blind people to walk independently and enjoy the freedom of walking. The model we present here act as a virtual eye to the visually disabled persons, which helps them to navigate to their destinations without the help of others. This model uses a mobile app, concurrent with the lately developed system using the fundamental principles of Arduino Uno board is based on ATmega328 microcontroller. This module is appended to a walking stick so that it is manageable by a blind person. The sensor in the apparatus returns the span warns with a sound alert if any target can be deleterious to the blind person.”
“There are currently many diabetes apps available, but there is limited evidence demonstrating clinical impact. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of a diabetes mobile app with in-app coaching by a certified diabetes educator on glycemic control for individuals with type 2 diabetes.”
An Information System to Remotely Monitor Oncological Palliative Care Patients
“For oncological patients, the introduction of palliative care in the early stages of the disease’s progression can have great benefits. The Portuguese government recently introduced a program to provide home palliative care support by creating specialized mobile teams, able to track, visit and address the patients’ problems. These teams must be available for the patient, when necessary and if necessary. The teams must also have updated knowledge about the daily evolution of the patients’ health.”
Maintaining Oral Health in Patients With Special Needs
“Patients with disabilities face many challenges in accessing oral health care services. This article reviews the barriers, strategies, and techniques tailored for treating this patient population that focus on promoting periodontal health. For caregivers of individuals with special needs, easy-to-use interactive tools like MagnusCards™, a mobile app that provides step-by-step guidance in oral care activities could help in forming the daily routines that can often be difficult for people living with cognitive special needs.”
A Pilot Mobile-Based Mindfulness Intervention for Cancer Patients and Their Informal Caregivers
“This 8-week single-arm pilot trial within Kaiser Permanente Northern California tested the feasibility of conducting a mobile app/online-based mindfulness intervention for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy and their caregivers. Participants were cancer patients with ≥8 weeks of remaining chemotherapy and their informal caregivers, where neither had a regular meditation practice. Participants were given access to a commercially available mindfulness program, Headspace™, via smartphone or computer and were asked to practice meditation using the program for 10–20 min daily. Data were collected on depression, anxiety, sleep, fatigue, quality of life at baseline and post-intervention using validated instruments.”
“The aim of this study was to measure the importance of smartphone applications (Apps) in medication adherence in children to help parents and caregivers in giving medication to children to maintain a good health and quality of life, and to improve current clinical practices in adherence to medications among Saudi pediatrics.”
“Health care increasingly collects patient-reported outcomes (PROs) via web-based platforms. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how patient age influences portal engagement. Patients undergoing elective surgery at a single multispecialty orthopedic practice from September 2014 to February 2017 had access to an online portal to complete PROs, message the clinic, and view physical therapy instructions.”
“To develop and validate a tool for assessing dietitians’ self-efficacy with using mobile health (mHealth) apps in dietetic practice.”
“Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of the world’s most common neurologic disorders. Fatigue is one of most common symptoms that persons with MS experience, having significant impact on their quality of life and limiting their activity levels. Self-management strategies are used to support them in the care of their health. Mobile health (mHealth) solutions are a way to offer persons with chronic conditions tools to successfully manage their symptoms and problems. Gamification is a current trend among mHealth apps used to create engaging user experiences and is suggested to be effective for behavioral change. To be effective, mHealth solutions need to be designed to specifically meet the intended audience needs. User-centered design (UCD) is a design philosophy that proposes placing end users’ needs and characteristics in the center of design and development, involving users early in the different phases of the software life cycle. There is a current gap in mHealth apps for persons with MS, which presents an interesting area to explore.”
“Adequate self-management is the cornerstone of preventing type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) complications. However, T1DM self-management is challenging for young people, who often struggle during the transition from childhood to adulthood. The mobile health (mHealth) app Young with Diabetes (YWD) was developed in collaboration with young people to enhance their T1DM self-management during this transition.”
“mHealth tools to help people manage chronic illnesses have surged in popularity, but evidence of their effectiveness remains mixed. The aim of this study was to address a gap in the mHealth and health psychology literatures by investigating how individual differences in psychological traits are associated with mHealth effectiveness. Drawing from regulatory mode theory, we tested the role of locomotion and assessment in explaining why mHealth tools are effective for some but not everyone.”
Describing the Process of Adopting Nutrition and Fitness Apps: Behavior Stage Model Approach
“Although mobile technologies such as smartphone apps are promising means for motivating people to adopt a healthier lifestyle (mHealth apps), previous studies have shown low adoption and continued use rates. Developing the means to address this issue requires further understanding of mHealth app nonusers and adoption processes. This study utilized a stage model approach based on the Precaution Adoption Process Model (PAPM), which proposes that people pass through qualitatively different motivational stages when adopting a behavior.”
Monitoring Energy Balance in Breast Cancer Survivors Using a Mobile App: Reliability Study
“The majority of breast cancer survivors do not meet recommendations in terms of diet and physical activity. To address this problem, we developed a mobile health (mHealth) app for assessing and monitoring healthy lifestyles in breast cancer survivors, called the Energy Balance on Cancer (BENECA) mHealth system. The BENECA mHealth system is a novel and interactive mHealth app, which allows breast cancer survivors to engage themselves in their energy balance monitoring. BENECA was designed to facilitate adherence to healthy lifestyles in an easy and intuitive way.”
Evaluating an mHealth App for Health and Well-Being at Work: Mixed-Method Qualitative Study
“To improve workers’ health and well-being, workplace interventions have been developed, but utilization and reach are unsatisfactory, and effects are small. In recent years, new approaches such as mobile health (mHealth) apps are being developed, but the evidence base is poor. Research is needed to examine its potential and to assess when, where, and for whom mHealth is efficacious in the occupational setting. To develop interventions for workers that actually will be adopted, insight into user satisfaction and technology acceptance is necessary. For this purpose, various qualitative evaluation methods are available.”
Use of Electronic Patient Reported Outcomes and Automated Devices …
“Congestive Heart failure (CHF) is a major health issue affecting 6.5 million people in the U.S. alone. Current reimbursement policies use readmission rates and length of hospital stays as indicators of quality of care. This project aimed to improve patients’ self-monitoring practices post-hospital discharge, quickly identify critical warning signs, decrease readmissions and reduce healthcare costs by integrating remote monitoring ePRO and connected devices into standard outpatient care practices.”
“The Brief Pain Inventory-short form (BPI-sf) is widely used in self-reported pain assessment, incorporates pain numeric rating scales (NRS) and is commonly utilized in electronic format in clinical trials, however, there is no published information about its usability as an electronic patient-reported outcome (ePRO) measure. The objective of this qualitative study was threefold: 1) to better understand pain experiences among patients with pleural or peritoneal mesothelioma; 2) to assess the interpretability of the instructions, item stem, recall period, and response option of the “worst pain” item of the BPI-sf; and 3) to examine the usability of the TrialMax Touch™ (CRF Health, Inc., Plymouth Meeting, PA) screen-based handheld device and the electronic format of the BPI-sf in a sub-sample of pleural mesothelioma patients.”
“Social interaction quality is related to cardiovascular functioning. Trait emotional reactivity may amplify cardiovascular responses to social interactions, but is often examined as a tendency to react to negative events. We took a broader approach by examining the joint effects of positive and negative emotional reactivity and social interaction quality on ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) and heart rate (HR) responses to daily social interactions.”
“Advances in pain measurement using ecological momentary assessments offer novel opportunities for understanding the temporal dynamics of pain. This study examined whether regime-switching models, which capture processes characterized by recurrent shifts between different states, provide clinically relevant information for characterizing individuals based on their temporal pain patterns.”
Physical Activity
Investing in college students: the role of the fitness tracker
“Fitness trackers are becoming a popular way to encourage physical activity and impact health behaviors. Although many college students may own and use fitness trackers, they remain a high-risk group in terms of rates of obesity and lack of physical activity. In this study, college students were provided with fitness trackers to self-monitor step count.”
Quality of Publicly Available Physical Activity Apps: Review and Content Analysis
“Within the new digital health landscape, the rise of health apps creates novel prospects for health promotion. The market is saturated with apps that aim to increase physical activity (PA). Despite the wide distribution and popularity of PA apps, there are limited data on their effectiveness, user experience, and safety of personal data. The purpose of this review and content analysis was to evaluate the quality of the most popular PA apps on the market using health care quality indicators.”
Anatomy of a Vulnerable Fitness Tracking System: Dissecting the Fitbit Cloud, App, and Firmware
“Fitbit fitness trackers record sensitive personal information, including daily step counts, heart rate profiles, and locations visited. By design, these devices gather and upload activity data to a cloud service, which provides aggregate statistics to mobile app users. The same principles govern numerous other Internet-of-Things (IoT) services that target different applications. As a market leader, Fitbit has developed perhaps the most secure wearables architecture that guards communication with end-to-end encryption. In this article, we analyze the complete Fitbit ecosystem and, despite the brand’s continuous efforts to harden its products, we demonstrate a series of vulnerabilities with potentially severe implications to user privacy and device security. We employ a range of techniques, such as protocol analysis, software decompiling, and both static and dynamic embedded code analysis, to reverse engineer previously undocumented communication semantics, the official smartphone app, and the tracker firmware.”
Describing the Process of Adopting Nutrition and Fitness Apps: Behavior Stage Model Approach
“Although mobile technologies such as smartphone apps are promising means for motivating people to adopt a healthier lifestyle (mHealth apps), previous studies have shown low adoption and continued use rates. Developing the means to address this issue requires further understanding of mHealth app nonusers and adoption processes. This study utilized a stage model approach based on the Precaution Adoption Process Model (PAPM), which proposes that people pass through qualitatively different motivational stages when adopting a behavior.”
“The number of elderly people over 60-year old is expected to reach 2 billion by 2050. With age people experience cognitive decline. While exercises are known to help, one of the age-associated issues is non-adherence. With the increasing adoption of technology by elderly, mobile devices become a good channel to deliver a persuasive solution. In this paper, we discuss the design and evaluation of Adherence Booster (AdBo). AdBo consists of a mobile app that encourages, monitors progress, and guides the elderly through appropriate daily exercises, short-term memory test to continuously measure any cognitive improvement, and a messaging system that reminds the elderly to exercise on a daily basis. AdBo is designed to overcome four identified barriers to adherence which are self-efficacy, outcome expectations, functional decline, and memory decline. The results of a randomized control trial evaluation show that AdBo was successful in boosting the elderly adherence, and elderly friendly exercises have positive effect on short memory performance.”
“Lifelogging physical activity (PA) assessment is crucial to healthcare technologies and studies for the purpose of treatments and interventions of chronic diseases. Traditional lifelogging PA monitoring is conducted in non-naturalistic settings by means of wearable devices or mobile phones such as fixed placements, controlled durations or dedicated sensors. Although they achieved satisfactory outcomes for healthcare studies, the practicability become the key issues. Recent advance of mobile devices make lifelogging PA tracking for healthy or unhealthy individuals possible. However, owning to diverse physical characteristics, immaturity of PA recognition techniques, different settings from manufactories and a majority of uncertainties in real life, the results of PA measurement is leading to be inapplicable for PA pattern detection in a long range, especially hardly exploited in the wellbeing monitoring or behaviour changes. This paper investigates and compares uncertainties of existing mobile devices for individual’s PA tracking.”
Anatomy of a Vulnerable Fitness Tracking System: Dissecting the Fitbit Cloud, App, and Firmware
“Fitbit fitness trackers record sensitive personal information, including daily step counts, heart rate profiles, and locations visited. By design, these devices gather and upload activity data to a cloud service, which provides aggregate statistics to mobile app users. The same principles govern numerous other Internet-of-Things (IoT) services that target different applications. As a market leader, Fitbit has developed perhaps the most secure wearables architecture that guards communication with end-to-end encryption. In this article, we analyze the complete Fitbit ecosystem and, despite the brand’s continuous efforts to harden its products, we demonstrate a series of vulnerabilities with potentially severe implications to user privacy and device security. We employ a range of techniques, such as protocol analysis, software decompiling, and both static and dynamic embedded code analysis, to reverse engineer previously undocumented communication semantics, the official smartphone app, and the tracker firmware.”
Using velocity loss for monitoring resistance training effort in a real world setting
“‘The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the changes in movement velocity during resistance training with different loads while the trainees are attempting to move the load at a pre-determined repetition duration.”
“Intention to engage in physical activity (PA) is an important concept in behavior change theories. However, age, body mass index (BMI), and sleep may influence one’s intention to engage in PA and intention might not predict actual activity. Purpose: This secondary analysis examined predictors of intention to engage in PA and if the factors associated with intention predicted objectively measured moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) in adults who were overweight or obese and enrolled in a weight loss study.”
Physiological Sensors
Psychopathology
Actissist: Proof-of-Concept Trial of a Theory-Driven Digital Intervention for Psychosis
“Timely access to intervention for psychosis is crucial yet problematic. As such, health care providers are forming digital strategies for addressing mental health challenges. A theory-driven digital intervention that monitors distressing experiences and provides real-time active management strategies could improve the speed and quality of recovery in psychosis, over and above conventional treatments. This study assesses the feasibility and acceptability of Actissist, a digital health intervention grounded in the cognitive model of psychosis that targets key early psychosis domains.”
The Role of Shame and Self-Criticism in Social Anxiety: A Daily–Diary Study in a Nonclinical Sample
“We sought to explore the daily association between shame and self-criticism, and the extent to which this association varies as a function of social anxiety symptoms.”
“Mobile health technologies have been found to improve the self-management of chronic diseases. However, there is limited research regarding their feasibility in supporting recovery from substance use disorders (SUDs) in China. The objective of this study was to examine the feasibility of a mobile phone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) app by testing the concordance of drug use assessed by the EMA, urine testing, and a life experience timeline (LET) assessment.”
“Inadequacies in mental health care coverage remain an enormous problem in the United States. Barriers include scarcity of accessible mental health care professionals. Use of a mental health mobile app incorporating social cognitive theory may help improve confidence in coping skills and improve anxiety and depression. Sinasprite is a mobile app that recruited users via self-referral and clinician referral. Users completed questionnaires to obtain demographic and medical histories.”
“Mobile health technologies have been found to improve the self-management of chronic diseases. However, there is limited research regarding their feasibility in supporting recovery from substance use disorders (SUDs) in China. The objective of this study was to examine the feasibility of a mobile phone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) app by testing the concordance of drug use assessed by the EMA, urine testing, and a life experience timeline (LET) assessment.”
Use of Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) in Non-Suicidal Self-Injury (NSSI): A Systematic Review
“Conceptualization and assessment of non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) has evolved substantially in recent years. In both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, NSSI and its related variables have traditionally been assessed retrospectively, leading to less precise studies of the mechanisms involved in the maintenance, cessation, or aggravation of this behavior. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) enables real-time collection of patient states, which can be very useful in the study of the mechanisms implied in this behavior. This systematic review aims to elucidate the current status of EMA use in NSSI investigation.”
“Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a serious disorder associated with impairment across multiple domains of functioning and treatment refractory behavior. Affective reactivity is a particularly detrimental feature of BPD; however, there are limitations of using single time-point assessments to measure this symptom. Studies have therefore employed ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to measure real time affective reactivity in BPD, with findings pointing to greater affective reactivity in adults with BPD versus healthy controls. However, little is known regarding antecedents of within-person affect change in BPD. Moreover, while it has been suggested that affective reactivity in BPD occurs in reaction to interpersonal cues of rejection and abandonment, few studies have demonstrated this in the context of daily life.”
“Stress and affect have been implicated in the maintenance of binge eating for women with symptoms of bulimia nervosa (BN). Neuroimaging and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) have separately examined how these variables may contribute to eating disorder behavior. Though both methodologies have their own strengths, it’s unclear how either methodology might inform the other. This study examined the impact of individual differences in neural reactivity to food cues following acute stress on the trajectories of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) surrounding binge eating. Women (n = 16) with BN symptoms viewed palatable food cues before and after a stress induction in the scanner.”
“Sleep problems are a modifiable risk factor for suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Yet, sparse research has examined temporal relationships between sleep disturbance, suicidal ideation, and psychological factors implicated in suicide, such as, entrapment. This is the first in-the-moment investigation of relationships between suicidal ideation, objective and subjective sleep parameters and perceptions of entrapment.”
Smoking Cessation
Statistics/Methodology