Efficient Processing of Geospatial mHealth Data Using a Scalable Crowdsensing Platform

Smart sensors and smartphones are becoming increasingly prevalent. Both can be used to gather environmental data (e.g., noise). Importantly, these devices can be connected to each other as well as to the Internet to collect large amounts of sensor data, which leads to many new opportunities. In particular, mobile crowdsensing techniques can be used to capture phenomena of common interest. Especially valuable insights can be gained if the collected data are additionally related to the time and place of the measurements. However, many technical solutions still use monolithic backends that are not capable of processing crowdsensing data in a flexible, efficient, and scalable manner. In this work, an architectural design was conceived with the goal to manage geospatial data in challenging crowdsensing healthcare scenarios. It will be shown how the proposed approach can be used to provide users with an interactive map of environmental noise, allowing tinnitus patients and other health-conscious people to avoid locations with harmful sound levels. Technically, the shown approach combines cloud-native applications with Big Data and stream processing concepts. In general, the presented architectural design shall serve as a foundation to implement practical and scalable crowdsensing platforms for various healthcare scenarios beyond the addressed use case

Smart Footwear Insole for Recognition of Foot Pronation and Supination Using Neural Networks

Abnormal foot postures during gait are common sources of pain and pathologies of the lower limbs. Measurements of foot plantar pressures in both dynamic and static conditions can detect these abnormal foot postures and prevent possible pathologies. In this work, a plantar pressure measurement system is developed to identify areas with higher or lower pressure load. This system is composed of an embedded system placed in the insole and a user application. The instrumented insole consists of a low-power microcontroller, seven pressure sensors and a low-energy bluetooth module. The user application receives and shows the insole pressure information in real-time and, finally, provides information about the foot posture. In order to identify the different pressure states and obtain the final information of the study with greater accuracy, a Deep Learning neural network system has been integrated into the user application. The neural network can be trained using a stored dataset in order to obtain the classification results in real-time. Results prove that this system provides an accuracy over 90% using a training dataset of 3000+ steps from 6 different users.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2016-77785-

Calibrating mini-mental state examination scores to predict misdiagnosed dementia patients

Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) is used as a diagnostic test for dementia to screen a patient’s cognitive assessment and disease severity. However, these examinations are often inaccurate and unreliable either due to human error or due to patients’ physical disability to correctly interpret the questions as well as motor deficit. Erroneous data may lead to a wrong assessment of a specific patient. Therefore, other clinical factors (e.g., gender and comorbidities) existing in electronic health records, can also play a significant role, while reporting her examination results. This work considers various clinical attributes of dementia patients to accurately determine their cognitive status in terms of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) Score. We employ machine learning models to calibrate MMSE score and classify the correctness of diagnosis among patients, in order to assist clinicians in a better understanding of the progression of cognitive impairment and subsequent treatment. For this purpose, we utilize a curated real-world ageing study data. A random forest prediction model is employed to estimate the Mini-Mental State Examination score, related to the diagnostic classification of patients.This model uses various clinical attributes to provide accurate MMSE predictions, succeeding in correcting an important percentage of cases that contain previously identified miscalculated scores in our dataset. Furthermore, we provide an effective classification mechanism for automatically identifying patient episodes with inaccurate MMSE values with high confidence. These tools can be combined to assist clinicians in automatically finding episodes within patient medical records where the MMSE score is probably miscalculated and estimating what the correct value should be. This provides valuable support in the decision making process for diagnosing potential dementia patients. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

A Pipelined Tracer-Aware Approach for Lesion Segmentation in Breast DCE-MRI

The recent spread of Deep Learning (DL) in medical imaging is pushing researchers to explore its suitability for lesion segmentation in Dynamic Contrast-Enhanced Magnetic-Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI), a complementary imaging procedure increasingly used in breast-cancer analysis. Despite some promising proposed solutions, we argue that a “naive” use of DL may have limited effectiveness as the presence of a contrast agent results in the acquisition of multimodal 4D images requiring thorough processing before training a DL model. We thus propose a pipelined approach where each stage is intended to deal with or to leverage a peculiar characteristic of breast DCE-MRI data: the use of a breast-masking pre-processing to remove non-breast tissues; the use of Three-Time-Points (3TP) slices to effectively highlight contrast agent time course; the application of a motion-correction technique to deal with patient involuntary movements; the leverage of a modified U-Net architecture tailored on the problem; and the introduction of a new “Eras/Epochs” training strategy to handle the unbalanced dataset while performing a strong data augmentation. We compared our pipelined solution against some literature works. The results show that our approach outperforms the competitors by a large margin (+9.13% over our previous solution) while also showing a higher generalization ability

Status and recommendations of technological and data-driven innovations in cancer care:Focus group study

Background: The status of the data-driven management of cancer care as well as the challenges, opportunities, and recommendations aimed at accelerating the rate of progress in this field are topics of great interest. Two international workshops, one conducted in June 2019 in Cordoba, Spain, and one in October 2019 in Athens, Greece, were organized by four Horizon 2020 (H2020) European Union (EU)-funded projects: BOUNCE, CATCH ITN, DESIREE, and MyPal. The issues covered included patient engagement, knowledge and data-driven decision support systems, patient journey, rehabilitation, personalized diagnosis, trust, assessment of guidelines, and interoperability of information and communication technology (ICT) platforms. A series of recommendations was provided as the complex landscape of data-driven technical innovation in cancer care was portrayed. Objective: This study aims to provide information on the current state of the art of technology and data-driven innovations for the management of cancer care through the work of four EU H2020-funded projects. Methods: Two international workshops on ICT in the management of cancer care were held, and several topics were identified through discussion among the participants. A focus group was formulated after the second workshop, in which the status of technological and data-driven cancer management as well as the challenges, opportunities, and recommendations in this area were collected and analyzed. Results: Technical and data-driven innovations provide promising tools for the management of cancer care. However, several challenges must be successfully addressed, such as patient engagement, interoperability of ICT-based systems, knowledge management, and trust. This paper analyzes these challenges, which can be opportunities for further research and practical implementation and can provide practical recommendations for future work. Conclusions: Technology and data-driven innovations are becoming an integral part of cancer care management. In this process, specific challenges need to be addressed, such as increasing trust and engaging the whole stakeholder ecosystem, to fully benefit from these innovations

Calibrating Mini-Mental State Examination Scores to Predict Misdiagnosed Dementia Patients

Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) is used as a diagnostic test for dementia to screen a patient’s cognitive assessment and disease severity. However, these examinations are often inaccurate and unreliable either due to human error or due to patients’ physical disability to correctly interpret the questions as well as motor deficit. Erroneous data may lead to a wrong assessment of a specific patient. Therefore, other clinical factors (e.g., gender and comorbidities) existing in electronic health records, can also play a significant role, while reporting her examination results. This work considers various clinical attributes of dementia patients to accurately determine their cognitive status in terms of the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) Score. We employ machine learning models to calibrate MMSE score and classify the correctness of diagnosis among patients, in order to assist clinicians in a better understanding of the progression of cognitive impairment and subsequent treatment. For this purpose, we utilize a curated real-world ageing study data. A random forest prediction model is employed to estimate the Mini-Mental State Examination score, related to the diagnostic classification of patients.This model uses various clinical attributes to provide accurate MMSE predictions, succeeding in correcting an important percentage of cases that contain previously identified miscalculated scores in our dataset. Furthermore, we provide an effective classification mechanism for automatically identifying patient episodes with inaccurate MMSE values with high confidence. These tools can be combined to assist clinicians in automatically finding episodes within patient medical records where the MMSE score is probably miscalculated and estimating what the correct value should be. This provides valuable support in the decision making process for diagnosing potential dementia patients

A Hand Motor Skills Rehabilitation for the Injured Implemented on a Social Robot

In this work, we introduce HaReS, a hand rehabilitation system. Our proposal integrates a series of exercises, jointly developed with a foundation for those with motor and cognitive injuries, that are aimed at improving the skills of patients and the adherence to the rehabilitation plan. Our system takes advantage of a low-cost hand-tracking device to provide a quantitative analysis of the performance of the patient. It also integrates a low-cost surface electromyography (sEMG) sensor in order to provide insight about which muscles are being activated while completing the exercises. It is also modular and can be deployed on a social robot. We tested our proposal in two different facilities for rehabilitation with high success. The therapists and patients felt more motivation while using HaReS, which improved the adherence to the rehabilitation plan. In addition, the therapists were able to provide services to more patients than when they used their traditional methodology.This work was funded by a Spanish Government PID2019-104818RB-I00 grant, supported by Feder funds. It was also supported by Spanish grants for PhD studies ACIF/2017/243 and FPU16/00887

Smartphone Apps in the Context of Tinnitus: Systematic Review

Smartphones containing sophisticated high-end hardware and offering high computational capabilities at extremely manageable costs have become mainstream and an integral part of users' lives. Widespread adoption of smartphone devices has encouraged the development of many smartphone applications, resulting in a well-established ecosystem, which is easily discoverable and accessible via respective marketplaces of differing mobile platforms. These smartphone applications are no longer exclusively limited to entertainment purposes but are increasingly established in the scientific and medical field. In the context of tinnitus, the ringing in the ear, these smartphone apps range from relief, management, self-help, all the way to interfacing external sensors to better understand the phenomenon. In this paper, we aim to bring forth the smartphone applications in and around tinnitus. Based on the PRISMA guidelines, we systematically analyze and investigate the current state of smartphone apps, that are directly applied in the context of tinnitus. In particular, we explore Google Scholar, CiteSeerX, Microsoft Academics, Semantic Scholar for the identification of scientific contributions. Additionally, we search and explore Google’s Play and Apple's App Stores to identify relevant smartphone apps and their respective properties. This review work gives (1) an up-to-date overview of existing apps, and (2) lists and discusses scientific literature pertaining to the smartphone apps used within the context of tinnitus

Towards the Interpretation of Sound Measurements from Smartphones Collected with Mobile Crowdsensing in the Healthcare Domain: An Experiment with Android Devices

The ubiquity of mobile devices fosters the combined use of ecological momentary assessments (EMA) and mobile crowdsensing (MCS) in the field of healthcare. This combination not only allows researchers to collect ecologically valid data, but also to use smartphone sensors to capture the context in which these data are collected. The TrackYourTinnitus (TYT) platform uses EMA to track users’ individual subjective tinnitus perception and MCS to capture an objective environmental sound level while the EMA questionnaire is filled in. However, the sound level data cannot be used directly among the different smartphones used by TYT users, since uncalibrated raw values are stored. This work describes an approach towards making these values comparable. In the described setting, the evaluation of sensor measurements from different smartphone users becomes increasingly prevalent. Therefore, the shown approach can be also considered as a more general solution as it not only shows how it helped to interpret TYT sound level data, but may also stimulate other researchers, especially those who need to interpret sensor data in a similar setting. Altogether, the approach will show that measuring sound levels with mobile devices is possible in healthcare scenarios, but there are many challenges to ensuring that the measured values are interpretable

Haemodialysis Electronic Patient Portal: A Design Requirements Analysis and Feasibility Study with Domain Experts

In 2013, the UK national renal registry established 57,000 adults in the UK were treated for advanced kidney failure, 23,683 (42%) receiving haemodialysis. Haemodialysis patients face some of the highest treatment burden in the National Health Service (NHS) and are among the most 'expensive' to treat. In addition, patients endure complex treatment trajectories. In this study, we have sought to gather and synthesise the opinion of clinical and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) domain experts (n=9) to establish a set of initial design requirements in order to test the feasibility of developing a digital aid (i.e. electronic haemodialysis patient portal) to support patients in the course of their treatment. Expert feedback was gathered by means of interviews and focus groups in order to instruct design requirements for a haemodialysis patient portal