Ventilatory mechanics in thoracic surgery

This thesis proved that chest wall motion analysis technology could be used in thoracic surgery to answer a number of clinical and physiological questions. We used it either as a diagnostic tool or for the evaluation of an intervention outcome. We divided its use as a diagnostic tool into two categories; 1- diagnosis before surgery and 2- diagnosis after surgery. In the evaluation of an intervention outcome, we divided its use after a number of interventions: 1. Cosmetic Surgery: Chapter 5: The Effect of Pectus Carinatum (Pigeon Chest) Repair on Chest Wall Mechanics 2. Prognostic Surgery: a) Chapter 4: The Effect of Chest Wall Reconstruction on Chest Wall Mechanics b) Chapter 10: Late Changes in Chest Wall Mechanics Post Lung Resection: The Effect of Lung Cancer Resection In COPD patients 3. Palliative Surgery: a) Chapter 6: The Effect of Lung Volume Reduction Surgery on Chest Wall Mechanics b) Chapter 3: The Effect of Diaphragmatic Plication (Fixation) on Chest Wall Mechanics 4. Post-operative Intervention: Chapter 8: The Effect of Thoracic Nerve Blocks on Chest Wall Mechanic

Smart Sensors for Healthcare and Medical Applications

This book focuses on new sensing technologies, measurement techniques, and their applications in medicine and healthcare. Specifically, the book briefly describes the potential of smart sensors in the aforementioned applications, collecting 24 articles selected and published in the Special Issue “Smart Sensors for Healthcare and Medical Applications”. We proposed this topic, being aware of the pivotal role that smart sensors can play in the improvement of healthcare services in both acute and chronic conditions as well as in prevention for a healthy life and active aging. The articles selected in this book cover a variety of topics related to the design, validation, and application of smart sensors to healthcare

Internet of Things enabled sedentary behaviour change in office workers: development and feasibility of a novel intervention (WorkMyWay)

Sedentary behaviour (SB) without breaks is associated with adverse health outcomes. The prevalence of prolonged sitting at work among office workers makes a case for SB interventions to target this setting and population. Everyday mundane objects augmented with microelectronics and ubiquitous computing represent a novel mode of delivery for behaviour change interventions enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT). However, there is insufficient research to guide the design of interventions delivered with smart objects. This research addresses this gap by developing WorkMyWay, a workplace SB intervention delivered with IoT-enabled office objects (e.g. smart water bottles and cups), and evaluating its feasibility and acceptability in an 8-week “in-the-wild” study. This thesis made 4 contributions across the disciplines of behavioural medicine and human-computer interactions (HCI). The first contribution is the development of the WorkMyWay intervention, which is informed by findings from a systematic scoping review of prior research in this field (Chapter 3), a diary-probed interview study with 20 office workers (Chapter 4), and a series of technology audit, prototyping, human-centred design, and requirement engineering processes (Chapter 5). Findings from the feasibility study (Chapter 6) suggest that despite technical issues with the data connection, participants perceive high value of WorkMyWay in changing their SB. The intervention is potentially implementable in office-based workplaces, as long as connectivity issues are fixed. Recommendations are made on improvements and a series of future studies in accordance with the Medical Research Council’s guidance on complex intervention development and evaluation. Second, this thesis deepens the theoretical understanding of SB change, by following the Behaviour Change Wheel framework (including the COM-B model, theoretical domain framework, and taxonomies of Behaviour Change Techniques (BCT)) throughout intervention design and evaluation. The intervention contents are specified using the BCT taxonomies (Chapter 5) and informed by the first published COM-B analysis of office worker’s prolonged sitting behaviour at work (Chapter 4). This allows the feasibility study (Chapter 6) to contribute to theory development by matching the interview questions and psychological measures (e.g. strength of habit) with the BCTs (e.g. action planning, prompts and cues) and associated theoretical underpinnings (e.g. goal accessibility). It also allows implementation issues to be considered in light of how well those theories and theory-informed BCTs can work in real-life settings. Third, this thesis makes a methodological contribution by documenting an interdisciplinary approach to develop a digital behaviour change intervention and a model for applying and developing theories of behaviour change in the wild. This helps address the challenge identified in Chapter 3, by bridging the gap between HCI and behavioural medicine, and catalyse the process of feeding technological innovations downstream to health practice and intervention research. Fourth, this research contributes to the HCI literature by proposing a 2×2 matrix framework to guide the design of technology for sustainable behaviour change. On one hand, the framework unifies some of the existing visions and concepts about ubiquitous computing and applies them to the context of behaviour change, by considering the type of cognitive process (automatic versus reflective, based on the dual process model) through which a persuasive design influences the behaviour. For another, the framework considers the required dosage of their technology intervention to maintain the behaviour, or the distribution of changes between the physical world and the human cognition

Automatic Monitoring of Physical Activity Related Affective States for Chronic Pain Rehabilitation

Chronic pain is a prevalent disorder that affects engagement in valued activities. This is a consequence of cognitive and affective barriers, particularly low self-efficacy and emotional distress (i.e. fear/anxiety and depressed mood), to physical functioning. Although clinicians intervene to reduce these barriers, their support is limited to clinical settings and its effects do not easily transfer to everyday functioning which is key to self-management for the person with pain. Analysis carried out in parallel with this thesis points to untapped opportunities for technology to support pain self-management or improved function in everyday activity settings. With this long-term goal for technology in mind, this thesis investigates the possibility of building systems that can automatically detect relevant psychological states from movement behaviour, making three main contributions. First, extension of the annotation of an existing dataset of participants with and without chronic pain performing physical exercises is used to develop a new model of chronic disabling pain where anxiety acts as mediator between pain and self-efficacy, emotional distress, and movement behaviour. Unlike previous models, which are largely theoretical and draw from broad measures of these variables, the proposed model uses event-specific data that better characterise the influence of pain and related states on engagement in physical activities. The model further shows that the relationship between these states and guarding during movement (the behaviour specified in the pain behaviour literature) is complex and behaviour descriptions of a lower level of granularity are needed for automatic classification of the states. The model also suggests that some of the states may be expressed via other movement behaviour types. Second, addressing this using the aforementioned dataset with the additional labels, and through an in-depth analysis of movement, this thesis provides an extended taxonomy of bodily cues for the automatic classification of pain, self-efficacy and emotional distress. In particular, the thesis provides understanding of novel cues of these states and deeper understanding of known cues of pain and emotional distress. Using machine learning algorithms, average F1 scores (mean across movement types) of 0.90, 0.87, and 0.86 were obtained for automatic detection of three levels of pain and self-efficacy and of two levels of emotional distress respectively, based on the bodily cues described and thus supporting the discriminative value of the proposed taxonomy. Third, based on this, the thesis acquired a new dataset of both functional and exercise movements of people with chronic pain based on low-cost wearable sensors designed for this thesis and informed by the previous studies. The modelling results of average F1 score of 0.78 for two-level detection of both pain and self-efficacy point to the possibility of automatic monitoring of these states in everyday functioning. With these contributions, the thesis provides understanding and tools necessary to advance the area of pain-related affective computing and groundbreaking insight that is critical to the understanding of chronic pain. Finally, the contributions lay the groundwork for physical rehabilitation technology to facilitate everyday functioning of people with chronic pain

Internet of Things enabled sedentary behaviour change in office workers: development and feasibility of a novel intervention (WorkMyWay)

Sedentary behaviour (SB) without breaks is associated with adverse health outcomes. The prevalence of prolonged sitting at work among office workers makes a case for SB interventions to target this setting and population. Everyday mundane objects augmented with microelectronics and ubiquitous computing represent a novel mode of delivery for behaviour change interventions enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT). However, there is insufficient research to guide the design of interventions delivered with smart objects. This research addresses this gap by developing WorkMyWay, a workplace SB intervention delivered with IoT-enabled office objects (e.g. smart water bottles and cups), and evaluating its feasibility and acceptability in an 8-week “in-the-wild” study. This thesis made 4 contributions across the disciplines of behavioural medicine and human-computer interactions (HCI). The first contribution is the development of the WorkMyWay intervention, which is informed by findings from a systematic scoping review of prior research in this field (Chapter 3), a diary-probed interview study with 20 office workers (Chapter 4), and a series of technology audit, prototyping, human-centred design, and requirement engineering processes (Chapter 5). Findings from the feasibility study (Chapter 6) suggest that despite technical issues with the data connection, participants perceive high value of WorkMyWay in changing their SB. The intervention is potentially implementable in office-based workplaces, as long as connectivity issues are fixed. Recommendations are made on improvements and a series of future studies in accordance with the Medical Research Council’s guidance on complex intervention development and evaluation. Second, this thesis deepens the theoretical understanding of SB change, by following the Behaviour Change Wheel framework (including the COM-B model, theoretical domain framework, and taxonomies of Behaviour Change Techniques (BCT)) throughout intervention design and evaluation. The intervention contents are specified using the BCT taxonomies (Chapter 5) and informed by the first published COM-B analysis of office worker’s prolonged sitting behaviour at work (Chapter 4). This allows the feasibility study (Chapter 6) to contribute to theory development by matching the interview questions and psychological measures (e.g. strength of habit) with the BCTs (e.g. action planning, prompts and cues) and associated theoretical underpinnings (e.g. goal accessibility). It also allows implementation issues to be considered in light of how well those theories and theory-informed BCTs can work in real-life settings. Third, this thesis makes a methodological contribution by documenting an interdisciplinary approach to develop a digital behaviour change intervention and a model for applying and developing theories of behaviour change in the wild. This helps address the challenge identified in Chapter 3, by bridging the gap between HCI and behavioural medicine, and catalyse the process of feeding technological innovations downstream to health practice and intervention research. Fourth, this research contributes to the HCI literature by proposing a 2×2 matrix framework to guide the design of technology for sustainable behaviour change. On one hand, the framework unifies some of the existing visions and concepts about ubiquitous computing and applies them to the context of behaviour change, by considering the type of cognitive process (automatic versus reflective, based on the dual process model) through which a persuasive design influences the behaviour. For another, the framework considers the required dosage of their technology intervention to maintain the behaviour, or the distribution of changes between the physical world and the human cognition

Advancing the Human Self

Do technologies advance our self-identities, as they do our bodies, cognitive skills, and the next developmental stage called postpersonal? Did we already manage to be fully human, before becoming posthuman? Are we doomed to disintegration and episodic selfhood? This book examines the impact of radical technopoiesis on our selves from a multidisciplinary perspective, including the health humanities, phenomenology, the life sciences and humanoid AI (artificial intelligence) ethics. Surprisingly, our body representations show more plasticity than scholarly concepts and sociocultural narratives. Our embodied selves can withstand transplants, bionic prostheses and radical somatechnics, but to remain autonomous and authentic, our agential potentials must be strengthened – and this is not through ‘psychosurgery’ and the brain–computer interface

Enhanced Living Environments

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1303 “Algorithms, Architectures and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments (AAPELE)”. The concept of Enhanced Living Environments (ELE) refers to the area of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) that is more related with Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Effective ELE solutions require appropriate ICT algorithms, architectures, platforms, and systems, having in view the advance of science and technology in this area and the development of new and innovative solutions that can provide improvements in the quality of life for people in their homes and can reduce the financial burden on the budgets of the healthcare providers. The aim of this book is to become a state-of-the-art reference, discussing progress made, as well as prompting future directions on theories, practices, standards, and strategies related to the ELE area. The book contains 12 chapters and can serve as a valuable reference for undergraduate students, post-graduate students, educators, faculty members, researchers, engineers, medical doctors, healthcare organizations, insurance companies, and research strategists working in this area

KEER2022

Avanttítol: KEER2022. DiversitiesDescripció del recurs: 25 juliol 202