DIL - A Conversational Agent for Heart Failure Patients

There is an exceptionally high rate of readmissions and rehospitalizations for patients suffering from Heart Failure. Best efforts to address this alarming problem from the Caregiver community have fallen short due to a shortage of trained clinical staff, failure to perform necessary self-management, and money. Using a Design Science Research framework, this work designed and evaluated DIL” (Sanskrit word for Heart), a Conversational Agent that complements the work of clinicians in achieving the desired behavioral and clinical outcomes. The aim is to provide the hospital with an information system that could bridge the current gap in care that occurs when the patient transitions from the hospital to the home environment. In a pilot study, we show that DIL was able to demonstrate the efficacy and utility as a tool to assist patients with heart failure in improving their self-care

ABC-training as a new intervention for hazardous alcohol drinking: Two proof-of-principle randomized pilot studies

Background and Aims: ABC-training is a new intervention to encourage health behavior change that targets the automatic activation of adaptive beliefs (i.e. automatic inferences). The aim of this proof-of-principle study was to test the effectiveness of web-based ABC-training to change outcome expectancies of alcohol drinking in a sample of hazardous drinkers. Design: One exploratory and one confirmatory experiment with two between-subject conditions (online ABC- and control-training) and assessments at baseline and 1 week later (after three sessions of training). Setting: Participants recruited on Prolific Academic completed the web-based study. Participants: Adults with self-reported hazardous alcohol drinking (Experiment 1: 193 adults, United Kingdom, age mean = 46.7 years; Experiment 2: 282 adults, different nationalities, age mean = 38.3 years). Intervention and Comparator: ABC-training involved completing an online task that required choosing personally relevant alternative behaviors to drinking alcohol in personally relevant antecedent contexts to attain personally important outcomes. Comparator was control-training, in which participants selected both the alternative behaviors and alcohol drinking an equal number of times. Training was completed at baseline, after 3 days and after 1 week. Measurements: Primary outcome was change in automatic and self-reported (negative/positive) outcome expectancies of alcohol drinking from baseline to after 1 week. Secondary outcomes were change in weekly alcohol consumption, self-efficacy, craving and motivation (and approach-alcohol associations in Experiment 1). Moderators were baseline outcome scores, motivation, age and alcohol dependency. Findings: Findings of this study are as follows: stronger increase in negative outcome expectancies after ABC- than control-training (Experiment 1: self-report, 95% confidence interval of difference scores (CIdiff) = [0.04, Inf]; automatic, CIdiff = [0.01, Inf]; Experiment 2: self-report, CIdiff = [0.16, Inf]; automatic, CIdiff = [0.002, Inf]). Stronger reduction in self-reported positive outcome expectancies after ABC- than control-training (Experiment 1: CIdiff = [−Inf, −0.01]; Experiment 2: CIdiff = [−Inf, −0.21]) but mixed findings on automatic positive outcome expectancies (Experiment 1: CIdiff = [−Inf, 0.02]; Experiment 2: CIdiff = [−Inf, −0.001]). Conclusions: ABC-training may change outcome expectancies of alcohol consumption, but testing of clinically relevant effects in other samples is warranted.</p

Understanding Games as Participation: an analytical model

Public health communication in Brazil has difficulties in reaching different groups of the population, as well as fostering their participation for building better health policies. Digital games could help in this regard, but there is a need of detailed models that account for social and participatory aspects of games and game playing. In order to provide such model, this study combined theoretical concepts from Game Studies, namely, the concept of games as participation and the Gaming Dispositif-model, with the Model of Communication as a Symbolic Market, from Latin American Communication Studies, creating a game model describing the socially inscribed relations among player, game and other players, based on participation. This article explains the mentioned concepts and the analytical model in detail, concluding with remarks on its possible uses.A comunicação em saúde no Brasil tem dificuldades em atingir diferentes grupos na população e incentivar a sua participação na construção de melhores políticas de saúde. Jogos digitais podem ajudar a respeito disso, mas nós carecemos de modelos detalhados que levem em conta os aspectos sociais e participatórios dos games e do acto de jogar. Para prover tal modelo, nós combinamos conceitos teóricos dos Game Studies, a saber, o conceito de jogos como participação e o modelo Gaming Dispositif, com o Modelo de Comunicação como Mercado Simbólico, dos estudos de Comunicação Latino-americanos, criando um modelo de jogo descrevendo as relações socialmente inscritas entre jogador, jogo e outros jogadores, baseadas em participação. Neste artigo, nós explicamos os conceitos mencionados e então apresentamos nosso modelo em detalhes, concluindo com observações sobre possíveis usos de tal modelo.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Virtual reality exposure therapy for school phobia

School phobia is characterized by fear to diverse events associated to school such as being beaten by a classmate, bullied or criticised in front of the lass, having to speak in public, doing exams, getting undressed to practice sports, etc. and can frequently cause young children to a chronic school refusal leading to significant social and academic difficulties. In older children and adolescents, the risk of a low school performance and an early school dropout is increased. Diverse techniques of graded and non-graded exposure have been used in the treatment of this problem. In vivo exposure alone or preceded by imagery exposure is the treatment more frequently applied. Clinical practice with children suggests the use of behavioural procedures requires a considerable amount of flexibility and creativity and procedures that warrantee their comprehension and cooperation. techniques based on virtual reality address these requirements and are capable of increasing the motivation of children to participate in treatment. In line with this, our group of research has developed a series of virtual environments that can be integrated to a treatment program for children and adolescents with school phobia. To study its efficacy, 18 participants with high scores on school phobia measures were randomly assigned to a group of treatment whereas other 18 participants were assigned to a waiting list group. A specific treatment effect on schoolrelated fears was found suggesting that exposure by means of virtual environments might be an effective treatment for school phobia