Cross-Modal Health State Estimation

Individuals create and consume more diverse data about themselves today than any time in history. Sources of this data include wearable devices, images, social media, geospatial information and more. A tremendous opportunity rests within cross-modal data analysis that leverages existing domain knowledge methods to understand and guide human health. Especially in chronic diseases, current medical practice uses a combination of sparse hospital based biological metrics (blood tests, expensive imaging, etc.) to understand the evolving health status of an individual. Future health systems must integrate data created at the individual level to better understand health status perpetually, especially in a cybernetic framework. In this work we fuse multiple user created and open source data streams along with established biomedical domain knowledge to give two types of quantitative state estimates of cardiovascular health. First, we use wearable devices to calculate cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), a known quantitative leading predictor of heart disease which is not routinely collected in clinical settings. Second, we estimate inherent genetic traits, living environmental risks, circadian rhythm, and biological metrics from a diverse dataset. Our experimental results on 24 subjects demonstrate how multi-modal data can provide personalized health insight. Understanding the dynamic nature of health status will pave the way for better health based recommendation engines, better clinical decision making and positive lifestyle changes.Comment: Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2018 Conference - Brave New Ideas, Seoul, Korea, ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5665-7/18/1

Using System Analysis and Personas for e-Health Interaction Design

Today, designers obtain more central roles in product and service development (Perks, Cooper, & Jones, 2005). They have to deal with increasingly complicated problems, like integrating the needs of various stakeholders while taking care about social, ethical and ecological consequences of their designs. To deal with this demanding design situation, they need to apply new methods to organize the available information and to negotiate the stakeholder’s perspectives. This paper describes how systems analysis supports the design process in a complex environment. In a case study, we demonstrate how this method enables designers to describe user requirements for complex design environments while considering the perspectives of various stakeholders. We present a design research project applying cybernetic systems analysis using the software ''System-Tools'' (Vester, 2002). Results from the analysis were taken to inform the design of an electronic patient record (EPR), considering the particularities of the German health care system. Based on the analysis, we developed a set of requirements for every stakeholder group, detailing the patients' perspective with persona descriptions. We then picked a main persona as reference for the EPR design. We describe the resulting design sketch and discuss the value of cybernetic systems analysis as a tool to deal with complex social environments. The result shows how the method helps designers to structure and organize information about the context and identify fruitful intervention opportunities for design. Keywords: E-Health; System Analysis, Cybernetics; Personas.</p

A Brief Intervention for Promoting Health and Wellness: A Holistic (Multidimensional) Approach Based upon Principles of Individual Systems Theory

This study examined the effects of a 12-week holistic (mult1dimensional) group intervention for promoting health and wellness. A total of 42 young adults (21 males and 21 females) with an average of 18.63 (ill= 1.03) years of age participated in the study. Participants were from a private university in the Pacific Northwest and randomly assigned to: a health-wellness group, a self-help group, and a no-treatment control group. Participants in the self-help group were encouraged to monitor and improve their health in various life dimensions on their own, utilize existing health care resources if necessary, and to report to the researcher each week on their progress. Participants in the health and wellness group attended 12 weekly group sessions. Each session lasted approximately 11/z hours. During this time participants were encouraged to shape and modify their lifestyle as a whole, and provided with a menu of cognitive-behavioral exercises to improve their health in various life dimensions. Each week they were encouraged to practice at least Z different cognitive-behavioral exercises. All participants completed pre and post-test measures. The measures included: the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scales (combined version), the Symptom Checklist-90-Reviscd (SCL-90R), and a biopsychosocial wellness inventory. The results of the study indicated there were no significant differences in pre-test scores between groups on each measure. However, at the end of the study, post-test scores revealed that participants in the health-wellness group were far more successful at reducing overall illness-related symptomology, and modifying their lives toward wellness in comparison to participants from the control and self-help groups. At the end of the study, participants in the health-wellness group were also less likely to perceive chance factors (i.e., fate and luck ) as having Jess of an impact on their health in comparison to participants from the control group. Despite the conscious efforts of participants in the self-help group, their post-test scores were not significantly different from the participants in the control group. The findings of the study indicate that a holistic (multidimensional) strategy for promoting health is effective and may significantly enlarge, as well as enrich mental health interventions

Birthing pains: How cyborgs refigure medical bodies, technologies, and objectives

Cyborgs are polymorphic and not yet visibly different from humans in part because cyborgic technologies have just been developed, in part because we are not trained to see how the post human arises. The birth of cyborgs alters the core of medicine from disease-containment and death-assessment to enhancement of function and image, to transgression of previous natural bounds as established by the possibility of space and oceanic travel. Cyborgs, as postmodern/ posthuman products of medicine, make visible the current shift in the construction of medical bodies, technologies, and objectives. Medical bodies have been determined by a conception of patienthood or diseased body. The connection of body and disease as distinct species happened in the medical enclosure: the hospital-clinic, during mid-late 19th century. In the hospital-clinic, the medical body has been clearly mapped in terms of disease identity or malfunction, and it has encountered medical technologies used to aid in diagnosis. The patient-doctor relationship has shifted because of the revolution in instrumentation at the turn of the century. Another shift can be discerned, as it is again mirrored in the relations of doctor-patient, as it has been re-structured through cyberspace and expert systems. Clearly, the revolution or scientification of medicine has been fueled by the tuberculosis crisis as it challenged medical and political institutions. A similar crisis has occurred with AIDS: is cyborg-technology the fulfillment of the modem dream of immortality and total control in the face of the epidemic? An easy answer to such question cannot be produced. Cyborgs are a product of the meeting of natural and human sciences through cybernetics. Their existence and proliferation destabilize assumptions at the philosophical foundations of knowledge and medicine as well as our conceptions of identity and rights, through an unsettling of the connection between community-individuality, of the distinction between private and public domains

Health State Estimation

Life's most valuable asset is health. Continuously understanding the state of our health and modeling how it evolves is essential if we wish to improve it. Given the opportunity that people live with more data about their life today than any other time in history, the challenge rests in interweaving this data with the growing body of knowledge to compute and model the health state of an individual continually. This dissertation presents an approach to build a personal model and dynamically estimate the health state of an individual by fusing multi-modal data and domain knowledge. The system is stitched together from four essential abstraction elements: 1. the events in our life, 2. the layers of our biological systems (from molecular to an organism), 3. the functional utilities that arise from biological underpinnings, and 4. how we interact with these utilities in the reality of daily life. Connecting these four elements via graph network blocks forms the backbone by which we instantiate a digital twin of an individual. Edges and nodes in this graph structure are then regularly updated with learning techniques as data is continuously digested. Experiments demonstrate the use of dense and heterogeneous real-world data from a variety of personal and environmental sensors to monitor individual cardiovascular health state. State estimation and individual modeling is the fundamental basis to depart from disease-oriented approaches to a total health continuum paradigm. Precision in predicting health requires understanding state trajectory. By encasing this estimation within a navigational approach, a systematic guidance framework can plan actions to transition a current state towards a desired one. This work concludes by presenting this framework of combining the health state and personal graph model to perpetually plan and assist us in living life towards our goals.Comment: Ph.D. Dissertation @ University of California, Irvin

Private Extensionists’ Role in an Effort to Achieve SDGs through Peri-Urban Community Empowerment

Infrastructure development has forced the transformation of rural farming communities to peri-urban communities and impacted community unreadiness. In Presidential Decree No. 59/2017, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have been set as indicators of Indonesia's development. Private extensionists have a fundamental role in community empowerment as the implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in large companies. This research has built an alternative concept of private extensionists in the SDGs. The research objectives are to analyze the role of private extensionists in community empowerment through self-social engineering and to analyze the impact of community empowerment on the SDGs' achievement. The research method used is participatory action research supported by a cybernetic approach: participant-observer, triangulation techniques, and focus group discussion (FGD). The results showed that private extensionists' implementing the concept of self-social engineering effectively empowered the community. This effectiveness occurs by placing the community as the subject of creative social energy in empowerment. This is in line with the application of the participatory communication paradigm and dialogue, which causes a communication convergence between participants. The peri-urban community empowerment approach in organic farming development positively impacts the achievement of SDGs