Outdoor Education and Mobile Learning: an Autobiographical Narrative Using Application-Based Information and Resources

Although mobile learning using smartphones and applications or apps have the potential to inform and educate individuals in an outdoor environment, users may find that connectivity issues and basic knowledge of outdoor environments, including both physical and emotional, could be limited by what this technology provided. This study provided my perspective as both participant and researcher on a journey over 150 miles on the Colorado Trail, using my iPhone as my primary tool for navigation and information for learning how to survive in an outdoor environment. From the beginning, the physical effects were difficult to overcome, but it was the psychological toll that became my greatest obstacle and the one element where mobile learning in the outdoor environment proved to have the greatest value. While this was one perspective, in a single study, by one participant, in which mobile learning in an outdoor environment took place, there were several themes that developed in regards to data connection, the use of fluid apps, the usefulness of static apps, and the restrictions of power in rural mountainous environments. These themes were emphasized to help future researchers further develop this information to help in the continued development of outdoor education using mobile learning

The 17th International research symposium on service excellence in management (QUIS17)

More than 30 years have passed since the first edition of QUIS symposium was held in Sweden in 1988. QUIS takes place every second year and attracts around 200-250 leading researchers and executives from all over the world. The QUIS symposium brings together the best interdisciplinary academic research and management practices in a forum to advance the study of service management, service dominant logic, service leadership, customer experience, technology and innovations in service. The pursuit of service excellence is a never-ending quest by organizations seeking to achieve outstanding performance in their field. Benchmarking one¿s own approaches against other organizations best practices and gaining insights from their experiences are powerful means for enhancing resultsPeiró Signes, Á. (2022). The 17th International research symposium on service excellence in management (QUIS17). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/QUIS17.2022.1516

Exploring virtual rewards in real life: A gimmick or a motivational tool for promoting physical activity?

Virtual rewards, digital badges or points, are often awarded to extrinsically reinforce desirable user behaviors. Acknowledging their motivational power for increased user engagement and enhanced playfulness, virtual reward systems are widely employed in contemporary activity tracking devices and services. While the characteristics of the current virtual reward systems vary and previous studies point to mixed outcomes around the effectiveness of virtual rewards for encouraging physical activity, there is little empirical research on the actual use and impact of virtual rewards provided from activity tracking tools in a real-life environment. To address the knowledge gaps on the use and effects of virtual rewards, I investigate the lived experiences of users with the virtual reward system of the activity tracking tool and their effects and value in the physical activity practices of individuals. To understand this both qualitatively and quantitatively, I conduct user experience research using mixed methods. Diary-based autoethnography research is preceded using three popular activity trackers, thereby having and documenting situated experiences with two different digital badge systems and one points-based system. My autoethnographic exploration is followed by an online survey with 113 existing users of activity tracking devices. The collected data is analysed through content and statistical analyses. By interpreting the findings from both studies and the reviewed literature, this thesis illustrates in great detail how virtual rewards interact with users and other system features in real-life practices. In addition, it provides a clearer picture of the effects of virtual rewards on people’s engagement in physical exercise and what makes some of them more valuable. Finally, it offers a set of considerations for the design of virtual reward systems that can lead to more user-centric, multi-layered, and meaningful virtual reward experience

Pacific Weekly, October 24, 1947

https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/pacifican/3010/thumbnail.jp

Accessibility of Health Data Representations for Older Adults: Challenges and Opportunities for Design

Health data of consumer off-the-shelf wearable devices is often conveyed to users through visual data representations and analyses. However, this is not always accessible to people with disabilities or older people due to low vision, cognitive impairments or literacy issues. Due to trade-offs between aesthetics predominance or information overload, real-time user feedback may not be conveyed easily from sensor devices through visual cues like graphs and texts. These difficulties may hinder critical data understanding. Additional auditory and tactile feedback can also provide immediate and accessible cues from these wearable devices, but it is necessary to understand existing data representation limitations initially. To avoid higher cognitive and visual overload, auditory and haptic cues can be designed to complement, replace or reinforce visual cues. In this paper, we outline the challenges in existing data representation and the necessary evidence to enhance the accessibility of health information from personal sensing devices used to monitor health parameters such as blood pressure, sleep, activity, heart rate and more. By creating innovative and inclusive user feedback, users will likely want to engage and interact with new devices and their own data

Quantifying Quality of Life

Describes technological methods and tools for objective and quantitative assessment of QoL Appraises technology-enabled methods for incorporating QoL measurements in medicine Highlights the success factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods This open access book presents the rise of technology-enabled methods and tools for objective, quantitative assessment of Quality of Life (QoL), while following the WHOQOL model. It is an in-depth resource describing and examining state-of-the-art, minimally obtrusive, ubiquitous technologies. Highlighting the required factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods and tools for QoL assessment, it also describes how these technologies can be leveraged for behavior change, disease prevention, health management and long-term QoL enhancement in populations at large. Quantifying Quality of Life: Incorporating Daily Life into Medicine fills a gap in the field of QoL by providing assessment methods, techniques and tools. These assessments differ from the current methods that are now mostly infrequent, subjective, qualitative, memory-based, context-poor and sparse. Therefore, it is an ideal resource for physicians, physicians in training, software and hardware developers, computer scientists, data scientists, behavioural scientists, entrepreneurs, healthcare leaders and administrators who are seeking an up-to-date resource on this subject

Health and Wellness Factors Affecting the Wholistic Lifestyle of National and International Christian Missionaries

This thesis will focus on the health and wellness of missionaries and will develop a wholistic framework for healthier living. This framework will be used as a guide to help sustain missionaries living in various cultural contexts by connecting and integrating the mind, body, and spirit in harmony for wholistic lifestyle. God intended for His people to live a healthy lifestyle and to take care of their temples. Missionaries are the backbone of cross-cultural evangelism, but they often find themselves living unhealthy lifestyles. These unhealthy lifestyles can have a negative impact on missionaries’ overall health, wellness, and fruitfulness in serving on the mission field. The goal of this thesis is to develop a framework to improve the quality of life and overall wellness of missionaries, so that they can continue to focus on sharing the gospel in a productive and healthy manner. This thesis will use questionnaires to collect data from various missionary populations around the world. In addition, various factors that can affect missionaries, health and wellness, such as social, emotional, nutritional, physical, mental, environmental, and spiritual health, are researched and evaluated. The quantitative data collection is extrapolated, compiled, and analyzed, and a wholistic framework is developed from this data. This thesis will be a model for Christians to develop healthy lifestyle principles and practices in ministry

Smart Technology for Telerehabilitation: A Smart Device Inertial-sensing Method for Gait Analysis

The aim of this work was to develop and validate an iPod Touch (4th generation) as a potential ambulatory monitoring system for clinical and non-clinical gait analysis. This thesis comprises four interrelated studies, the first overviews the current available literature on wearable accelerometry-based technology (AT) able to assess mobility-related functional activities in subjects with neurological conditions in home and community settings. The second study focuses on the detection of time-accurate and robust gait features from a single inertial measurement unit (IMU) on the lower back, establishing a reference framework in the process. The third study presents a simple step length algorithm for straight-line walking and the fourth and final study addresses the accuracy of an iPod’s inertial-sensing capabilities, more specifically, the validity of an inertial-sensing method (integrated in an iPod) to obtain time-accurate vertical lower trunk displacement measures. The systematic review revealed that present research primarily focuses on the development of accurate methods able to identify and distinguish different functional activities. While these are important aims, much of the conducted work remains in laboratory environments, with relatively little research moving from the “bench to the bedside.” This review only identified a few studies that explored AT’s potential outside of laboratory settings, indicating that clinical and real-world research significantly lags behind its engineering counterpart. In addition, AT methods are largely based on machine-learning algorithms that rely on a feature selection process. However, extracted features depend on the signal output being measured, which is seldom described. It is, therefore, difficult to determine the accuracy of AT methods without characterizing gait signals first. Furthermore, much variability exists among approaches (including the numbers of body-fixed sensors and sensor locations) to obtain useful data to analyze human movement. From an end-user’s perspective, reducing the amount of sensors to one instrument that is attached to a single location on the body would greatly simplify the design and use of the system. With this in mind, the accuracy of formerly identified or gait events from a single IMU attached to the lower trunk was explored. The study’s analysis of the trunk’s vertical and anterior-posterior acceleration pattern (and of their integrands) demonstrates, that a combination of both signals may provide more nuanced information regarding a person’s gait cycle, ultimately permitting more clinically relevant gait features to be extracted. Going one step further, a modified step length algorithm based on a pendulum model of the swing leg was proposed. By incorporating the trunk’s anterior-posterior displacement, more accurate predictions of mean step length can be made in healthy subjects at self-selected walking speeds. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm estimates step length with errors less than 3% (mean error of 0.80 ± 2.01cm). The performance of this algorithm, however, still needs to be verified for those suffering from gait disturbances. Having established a referential framework for the extraction of temporal gait parameters as well as an algorithm for step length estimations from one instrument attached to the lower trunk, the fourth and final study explored the inertial-sensing capabilities of an iPod Touch. With the help of Dr. Ian Sheret and Oxford Brookes’ spin-off company ‘Wildknowledge’, a smart application for the iPod Touch was developed. The study results demonstrate that the proposed inertial-sensing method can reliably derive lower trunk vertical displacement (intraclass correlations ranging from .80 to .96) with similar agreement measurement levels to those gathered by a conventional inertial sensor (small systematic error of 2.2mm and a typical error of 3mm). By incorporating the aforementioned methods, an iPod Touch can potentially serve as a novel ambulatory monitor system capable of assessing gait in clinical and non-clinical environments

Quantifying Quality of Life

Describes technological methods and tools for objective and quantitative assessment of QoL Appraises technology-enabled methods for incorporating QoL measurements in medicine Highlights the success factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods This open access book presents the rise of technology-enabled methods and tools for objective, quantitative assessment of Quality of Life (QoL), while following the WHOQOL model. It is an in-depth resource describing and examining state-of-the-art, minimally obtrusive, ubiquitous technologies. Highlighting the required factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods and tools for QoL assessment, it also describes how these technologies can be leveraged for behavior change, disease prevention, health management and long-term QoL enhancement in populations at large. Quantifying Quality of Life: Incorporating Daily Life into Medicine fills a gap in the field of QoL by providing assessment methods, techniques and tools. These assessments differ from the current methods that are now mostly infrequent, subjective, qualitative, memory-based, context-poor and sparse. Therefore, it is an ideal resource for physicians, physicians in training, software and hardware developers, computer scientists, data scientists, behavioural scientists, entrepreneurs, healthcare leaders and administrators who are seeking an up-to-date resource on this subject