3,368 research outputs found

    The struggling infectious diseases fellow: Remediation challenges and opportunities

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    Remediation of struggling learners is a challenge faced by all educators. In recognition of this reality, and in light of contemporary challenges facing infectious diseases (ID) fellowship program directors, the Infectious Diseases Society of America Training Program Directors\u27 Committee focused the 2018 National Fellowship Program Directors\u27 Meeting at IDWeek on Remediation of the Struggling Fellow. Small group discussions addressed 7 core topics, including feedback and evaluations, performance management and remediation, knowledge deficits, fellow well-being, efficiency and time management, teaching skills, and career development. This manuscript synthesizes those discussions around a competency-based framework to provide program directors and other educators with a roadmap for addressing common contemporary remediation challenges

    Wellness Lessons From Transportation Companies, Research Report WP 11-01

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    The purpose of this report is to describe wellness programs and offer two suggestions for improving how they are delivered to commercial drivers and operators. It is not a large sample empirical study from which generalizations can be made. Rather, the Mineta Transportation Institute commissioned brief case studies of transportation companies to show what several organizations have done. Stress, nicotine use, sleep apnea, obesity and lack of information are significant barriers to wellness in commercial drivers/operators. Many wellness programs ask the individual driver/operator to lose weight; exercise more; and monitor blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and other such indicators of health. However, little is done to change the environment or adopt structural interventions such as forbidding nicotine use, as is possible in 20 states. Other structural interventions include those possible at the levels of the company and community, including access to healthy food rather than the junk food drivers often can find on the road. At the societal level, more public transit that gets people walking and out of their cars, cities designed for people to walk and cycle in rather than drive from work to a sprawling suburb, and encouraging food manufacturers to make healthy food (rather than a toxic mix of sodium, fat and sugar to boost one’s craving for a particular food) are just a few measures that could improve the health and well being of the public. The Union Pacific Corporation (rail transportation), and Con-way Freight (trucking) are included because they were willing to share information and are large publicly traded companies. The Utah Transit Authority (UTA) is included because other transit authorities recommended it to the authors, as it has a long history in wellness as part of local government and it too chose to participate. Two issues are discussed: the first is the importance of using the mitigation of erectile dysfunction in the promotion of wellness programs to commercial drivers/operators and the second issue is to urge employers to consider banning tobacco use, both on and off the job, where legal

    Self “Sensor”Ship: An Interdisciplinary Investigation of the Persuasiveness, Social Implications, and Ethical Design of Self-Sensoring Prescriptive Applications

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    This dissertation research investigates the social implications of computing artifacts that make use of sensor driven self-quantification to implicitly or explicitly direct user behaviors. These technologies are referred to here as self-sensoring prescriptive applications (SSPA’s). This genre of technological application has a strong presence in healthcare as a means to monitor health, modify behavior, improve health outcomes, and reduce medical costs. However, the commercial sector is quickly adopting SSPA’s as a means to monitor and/or modify consumer behaviors as well (Swan, 2013). These wearable devices typically monitor factors such as movement, heartrate, and respiration; ostensibly to guide the users to better or more informed choices about their physical fitness (Lee & Drake, 2013; Swan, 2012b). However, applications that claim to use biosensor data to assist in mood maintenance and control are entering the market (Bolluyt, 2015), and applications to aid in decision making about consumer products are on the horizon as well (Swan, 2012b). Interestingly, there is little existing research that investigates the direct impact biosensor data have on decision making, nor on the risks, benefits, or regulation of such technologies. The research presented here is inspired by a number of separate but related gaps in existing literature about the social implications of SSPA’s. First, how SSPA’s impact individual and group decision making and attitude formation within non-medicalcare domains (e.g. will a message about what product to buy be more persuasive if it claims to have based the recommendation on your biometric information?). Second, how the design and designers of SSPA’s shape social behaviors and third, how these factors are or are not being considered in future design and public policy decisions

    Gamification Strategies : A Characterization Using Formal Argumentation Theory

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    Gamified software applications are omnipresent in everyday life. The idea of using game design elements in non-game contexts to engage and motivate tasks has rapidly gained traction in the human–computer interaction and the psychology fields, but scarcely in the artificial intelligence (AI) research area. In this paper, we propose a software agent perspective of gamification elements to solve two specific problems: (1) a reactive perspective that gamification designers have for those gamified affordances, i.e. the visual cue (output) is only triggered by user interaction, and (2) a lack of formal treatment of gamified software, where strict characterization of software behavior as done in AI, guarantee that the information-based output follows the intended goal of the software. Our contributions presented in this paper are (1) two taxonomies of affordances based on the type of information that every element communicates, and the type of agency that is capable; (2) a framework to formalize the decision-making process for gamified software agents; and (3) a characterization of gamified stories using formal argumentation theory dialogues. We exemplify our contributions with two gamified platforms in the healthcare and financial literacy fields.© The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

    Healthcare in the Smart Home: A Study of Past, Present and Future

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    Open Access journalUbiquitous or Pervasive Computing is an increasingly used term throughout the technology industry and is beginning to enter the consumer electronics space in its most recent form under the umbrella term: “Internet of Things”. One area of focus is in augmenting the home with intelligent, networked sensors and computers to create a Smart Home which opens a host of possibilities for the role of tomorrow’s dwelling. As the world’s population continues to live longer and consequently experience more medical-related ailments, at the same time institutional healthcare is struggling to cope, the role of the Smart Home becomes paramount to monitoring a dweller’s health and providing any necessary intervention. This study looks at the history of Smart Home Healthcare, current research areas, and potential areas of future investigation. Unique categorisations are presented in Activities of Daily Living (ADL) and Personal Sensors, and a thorough look at the application of Smart Home Healthcare is presented. Technology can augment traditional methods of healthcare delivery and in some cases completely replace it. Costs can be reduced and medical adherence can be increased, all of which contribute to a more sustainable and effective model of care

    Automatic Generation of Personalized Recommendations in eCoaching

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    Denne avhandlingen omhandler eCoaching for personlig livsstilsstøtte i sanntid ved bruk av informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi. Utfordringen er å designe, utvikle og teknisk evaluere en prototyp av en intelligent eCoach som automatisk genererer personlige og evidensbaserte anbefalinger til en bedre livsstil. Den utviklede løsningen er fokusert på forbedring av fysisk aktivitet. Prototypen bruker bærbare medisinske aktivitetssensorer. De innsamlede data blir semantisk representert og kunstig intelligente algoritmer genererer automatisk meningsfulle, personlige og kontekstbaserte anbefalinger for mindre stillesittende tid. Oppgaven bruker den veletablerte designvitenskapelige forskningsmetodikken for å utvikle teoretiske grunnlag og praktiske implementeringer. Samlet sett fokuserer denne forskningen på teknologisk verifisering snarere enn klinisk evaluering.publishedVersio

    Principles for Designing Context-Aware Applications for Physical Activity Promotion

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    Mobile devices with embedded sensors have become commonplace, carried by billions of people worldwide. Their potential to influence positive health behaviors such as physical activity in people is just starting to be realized. Two critical ingredients, an accurate understanding of human behavior and use of that knowledge for building computational models, underpin all emerging behavior change applications. Early research prototypes suggest that such applications would facilitate people to make difficult decisions to manage their complex behaviors. However, the progress towards building real-world systems that support behavior change has been much slower than expected. The extreme diversity in real-world contextual conditions and user characteristics has prevented the conception of systems that scale and support end-users’ goals. We believe that solutions to the many challenges of designing context-aware systems for behavior change exist in three areas: building behavior models amenable to computational reasoning, designing better tools to improve our understanding of human behavior, and developing new applications that scale existing ways of achieving behavior change. With physical activity as its focus, this thesis addresses some crucial challenges that can move the field forward. Specifically, this thesis provides the notion of sweet spots, a phenomenological account of how people make and execute their physical activity plans. The key contribution of this concept is in its potential to improve the predictability of computational models supporting physical activity planning. To further improve our understanding of the dynamic nature of human behavior, we designed and built Heed, a low-cost, distributed and situated self-reporting device. Heed’s single-purpose and situated nature proved its use as the preferred device for self-reporting in many contexts. We finally present a crowdsourcing system that leverages expert knowledge to write personalized behavior change messages for large-scale context-aware applications.PHDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144089/1/gparuthi_1.pd
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