Health Report

This Plan for Health is an unusual undertaking in two respects. It is part of the Go To 2040 regional master plan along with other human services components that have, historically, been outside the purview of planners, who are usually more concerned with issues such as land use, transportation, and solid waste disposal. And the planning horizon covers three decades, providing a rare opportunity for health planners to engage in truly long range planning. Health is more than medical care: a variety of factors determine the health of individuals and a community. These "underlying determinants" include demographic composition, income and poverty, employment, social status, cultural beliefs and practices, level of educational attainment, environmental conditions, genetics, individual behaviors, and public health measures, in addition to the quality and utilization of health care services.Most planning efforts, which attempt to affect community health, deal only with public health and medical services delivery, even though the other factors are known to have a greater influence on community and individual health. This plan approaches the challenge differently; it focuses on the underlying determinants of health and moves beyond the narrower focus that health planners and public health officials traditionally take. This report identifies the connections that education, land use, transportation, food and hunger, civic engagement, workforce, and the economy have with health, and it focuses on strategies and interventions that can be pursued in these sectors to improve health throughout this region

Exploring The Responsibilities Of Single-Inhabitant Smart Homes With Use Cases

DOI: 10.3233/AIS-2010-0076This paper makes a number of contributions to the field of requirements analysis for Smart Homes. It introduces Use Cases as a tool for exploring the responsibilities of Smart Homes and it proposes a modification of the conventional Use Case structure to suit the particular requirements of Smart Homes. It presents a taxonomy of Smart-Home-related Use Cases with seven categories. It draws on those Use Cases as raw material for developing questions and conclusions about the design of Smart Homes for single elderly inhabitants, and it introduces the SHMUC repository, a web-based repository of Use Cases related to Smart Homes that anyone can exploit and to which anyone may contribute

Gamification, social networks and sustainable environments

Intelligent environments and ambient intelligence enabled systems provide means to gather rich information from both environments and its users. With the help of such systems, it is possible to foster communities of ambient intelligence systems with community driven knowledge, which is created by individual actions and setups in each of the environments. Such arrangements provides the potential to build systems that promote better practices and more efficient and sustainable environments by promoting the community best examples and engaging users to adopt and develop proactive behaviors to improve their standings in the community. This work aims to use knowledge from communities of intelligent environments to their own benefit. The approach presented in this work uses information from different environments, ranking them according to their sustainability assessment. Recommendations are then computed using similarity and clustering functions ranking users and environments, updating their previous records and launching new recommendations in the process. Gamification concepts are used in order to keep users motivation and engage them actively to produce better results in terms of sustainability

HIV Prevention in the Era of Expanded Treatment Access

Makes recommendations on how to forge a comprehensive response to the global AIDS epidemic by integrating prevention interventions into expanding treatment programs, and on new approaches to prevention that will be required as treatment access expands

CoachAI: A Conversational Agent Assisted Health Coaching Platform

Poor lifestyle represents a health risk factor and is the leading cause of morbidity and chronic conditions. The impact of poor lifestyle can be significantly altered by individual behavior change. Although the current shift in healthcare towards a long lasting modifiable behavior, however, with increasing caregiver workload and individuals' continuous needs of care, there is a need to ease caregiver's work while ensuring continuous interaction with users. This paper describes the design and validation of CoachAI, a conversational agent assisted health coaching system to support health intervention delivery to individuals and groups. CoachAI instantiates a text based healthcare chatbot system that bridges the remote human coach and the users. This research provides three main contributions to the preventive healthcare and healthy lifestyle promotion: (1) it presents the conversational agent to aid the caregiver; (2) it aims to decrease caregiver's workload and enhance care given to users, by handling (automating) repetitive caregiver tasks; and (3) it presents a domain independent mobile health conversational agent for health intervention delivery. We will discuss our approach and analyze the results of a one month validation study on physical activity, healthy diet and stress management

Gamification, Social Networks and Sustainable Environments

Intelligent environments and ambient intelligence enabled systems provide means to gather rich information from both environments and its users. With the help of such systems, it is possible to foster communities of ambient intelligence systems with community driven knowledge, which is created by individual actions and setups in each of the environments. Such arrangements provides the potential to build systems that promote better practices and more efficient and sustainable environments by promoting the community best examples and engaging users to adopt and develop proactive behaviors to improve their standings in the community. This work aims to use knowledge from communities of intelligent environments to their own benefit. The approach presented in this work uses information from different environments, ranking them according to their sustainability assessment. Recommendations are then computed using similarity and clustering functions ranking users and environments, updating their previous records and launching new recommendations in the process. Gamification concepts are used in order to keep users motivation and engage them actively to produce better results in terms of sustainabilit