Mining and analysis of audiology data to find significant factors associated with tinnitus masker

Objectives: The objective of this research is to find the factors associated with tinnitus masker from the literature, and by using the large amount of audiology data available from a large NHS (National Health Services, UK) hearing aid clinic. The factors evaluated were hearing impairment, age, gender, hearing aid type, mould and clinical comments. Design: The research includes literature survey for factors associated with tinnitus masker, and performs the analysis of audiology data using statistical and data mining techniques. Setting: This research uses a large audiology data but it also faced the problem of limited data for tinnitus. Participants: It uses 1,316 records for tinnitus and other diagnoses, and 10,437 records of clinical comments from a hearing aid clinic. Primary and secondary outcome measures: The research is looking for variables associated with tinnitus masker, and in future, these variables can be combined into a single model to develop a decision support system to predict about tinnitus masker for a patient. Results: The results demonstrated that tinnitus maskers are more likely to be fit to individuals with milder forms of hearing loss, and the factors age, gender, type of hearing aid and mould were all found significantly associated with tinnitus masker. In particular, those patients having Age<=55 years were more likely to wear a tinnitus masker, as well as those with milder forms of hearing loss. ITE (in the ear) hearing aids were also found associated with tinnitus masker. A feedback on the results of association of mould with tinnitus masker from a professional audiologist of a large NHS (National Health Services, UK) was also taken to better understand them. The results were obtained with different accuracy for different techniques. For example, the chi-squared test results were obtained with 95% accuracy, for Support and Confidence only those results were retained which had more than 1% Support and 80% Confidence. Conclusions: The variables audiograms, age, gender, hearing aid type and mould were found associated with the choice of tinnitus masker in the literature and by using statistical and data mining techniques. The further work in this research would lead to the development of a decision support system for tinnitus masker with an explanation that how that decision was obtained

AUTOMATED META-ACTIONS DISCOVERY FOR PERSONALIZED MEDICAL TREATMENTS

Healthcare, among other domains, provides an attractive ground of work for knowl- edge discovery researchers. There exist several branches of health informatics and health data-mining from which we find actionable knowledge discovery is underserved. Actionable knowledge is best represented by patterns of structured actions that in- form decision makers about actions to take rather than providing static information that may or may not hint to actions. The Action rules model is a good example of active structured action patterns that informs us about the actions to perform to reach a desired outcome. It is augmented by the meta-actions model that rep- resents passive structured effects triggered by the application of an action. In this dissertation, we focus primarily on the meta-actions model that can be mapped to medical treatments and their effects in the healthcare arena. Our core contribution lies in structuring meta-actions and their effects (positive, neutral, negative, and side effects) along with mining techniques and evaluation metrics for meta-action effects. In addition to the mining techniques for treatment effects, this dissertation provides analysis and prediction of side effects, personalized action rules, alternatives for treat- ments with negative outcomes, evaluation for treatments success, and personalized recommendations for treatments. We used the tinnitus handicap dataset and the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) Florida State Inpatient Databases (SID 2010) to validate our work. The results show the efficiency of our methods

Assess Your Stress: Conceptual re-design of the TrackYourTinnitus system for measuring stress at the workplace

The Track Your Tinnitus (TYT ) platform has been developed in a joint project by the universities of Ulm and Regensburg in Germany for several years. The framework was created to assist tinnitus patients in measuring and keeping track of their symptoms over extended periods of time. For this purpose, TYT provides a central, WWW-based platform to manage and distribute questionnaires to users, who fill in these questionnaires using their mobile devices multiple times per day when prompted by the application. In comparison to other non-computerized methods, this approach offers a more precise and reliable measurement of psychological phenomena and symptoms like tinnitus, which are generally difficult to estimate otherwise. However, the general principles behind TYT can also be applied to other use cases. After a new German law was passed, which aims to improve public health through a variety of measures in all areas of life, the stakeholders of the TYT project decided to initialize a project to apply TYT to measurement of stress at the workplace. Another purpose of this project was to completely redesign and rebuild the framework from scratch due to flaws in its design and the now outdated software it was built on. This new iteration of the TYT concept was named Assess Your Stress (AYS). The main goals were to apply the TYT concept to stress tracking, while also generalizing the platform to make it more open for extensions and different fields of application in the future. The project’s main contributions are a detailed concept of the platform overhaul, a stable core system, upon which future extensions can be built, and a basic web-based client developed as a single-page application in AngularJS. While the system’s application to stress tracking is prototypical in this release, it serves as a preliminary indication that the principles behind TYT are useful in the context of stress tracking

Mental Disorders

This book brings together an international array of stars of the mental health professions to create a cutting edge volume that sheds light on many important and heretofore poorly understood issues in psychopathology. Mental Disorders-Theoretical and Empirical perspectives will be an important addition to the libraries of scholars and clinicians