When do we eat? An evaluation of food items input into an electronic monitoring application

We present a formative study that examines what, when, and how participants in a chronic kidney disease (stage 5) population input food items into an electronic intake monitoring application. Participants scanned food item barcodes or voice recorded food items they consumed during a three week period. The results indicated that a learning curve was associated with barcode scanning; participants with low literacy skills had difficulty describing food items in voice recordings; and participants input food items depending on when they had dialysis treatment. Participants thought this electronic self monitoring application would be helpful for chronically ill populations in their first year of treatmen

Designing Fitness Apps Using Persuasive Technology: A Text Mining Approach

Popularity and pervasiveness of mobile apps have great potential to motivate healthy behavioural modifications. Considering the increased prevalence of obesity, overweight and sedentary lifestyle in modern societies, this study takes an important step in proposing design elements for fitness apps that can stimulate enhanced physical activity behaviour. We posit that persuasive technology principles infused into social cognitive theory elements will lead to the design of successful fitness apps. We empirically validated our conceptualization using app descriptions and lifecycle data of mobile apps. Implications for practice and future research are discussed

Advances in psychological treatments: the use of new Communication and Information Technologies

Los tratamientos psicológicos han logrado avances importantes en los últimos años. Desde la puesta en marcha del movimiento de la psicología basada en la evidencia disponemos de un buen número de protocolos de tratamiento que han demostrado ser eficaces y eficientes. En este sentido, merece subrayarse el papel desempeñado por las nuevas tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TICs). Nuestro grupo de investigación ha desarrollado y validado una serie de aplicaciones basadas en TICs que se comentan es este trabajo. En concreto, técnicas de Realidad Virtual, Realidad Aumentada y aplicaciones de Telepsicología basadas en internet. También se analizan algunas de las ventajas y limitaciones de estos procedimientos frente a los tratamientos tradicionales y se presentan datos acerca del grado de satisfacción manifestado por pacientes que recibieron un programa de tratamiento basado en TICs y se comentan algunas perspectivas de trabajo futuras.The psychological treatments have advanced notably in the last years. Since the beginning of the psychology movement based on evidence we have already available a high number of treatment protocols that have proved to be effective and efficient. In this sense, it should be highlighted the role played by the new communication and information technologies (CITs). Our research group has developed and validated a series of applications based on CITs that are presented in this work. Specifically, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality techniques and Telepsychology applications based on the internet. The advantages that these new procedures have over the traditional treatments, as well as some limitations currently existent regarding the use of CITs are analysed. Finally, data about the level of satisfaction reported by patients who received a treatment program based on CITs are presented, and some future perspectives in the field are also analysed

Advances in psychological treatments: the use of new Communication and Information Technologies

Los tratamientos psicológicos han logrado avances importantes en los últimos años. Desde la puesta en marcha del movimiento de la psicología basada en la evidencia disponemos de un buen número de protocolos de tratamiento que han demostrado ser eficaces y eficientes. En este sentido, merece subrayarse el papel desempeñado por las nuevas tecnologías de la información y la comunicación (TICs). Nuestro grupo de investigación ha desarrollado y validado una serie de aplicaciones basadas en TICs que se comentan es este trabajo. En concreto, técnicas de Realidad Virtual, Realidad Aumentada y aplicaciones de Telepsicología basadas en internet. También se analizan algunas de las ventajas y limitaciones de estos procedimientos frente a los tratamientos tradicionales y se presentan datos acerca del grado de satisfacción manifestado por pacientes que recibieron un programa de tratamiento basado en TICs y se comentan algunas perspectivas de trabajo futuras.The psychological treatments have advanced notably in the last years. Since the beginning of the psychology movement based on evidence we have already available a high number of treatment protocols that have proved to be effective and efficient. In this sense, it should be highlighted the role played by the new communication and information technologies (CITs). Our research group has developed and validated a series of applications based on CITs that are presented in this work. Specifically, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality techniques and Telepsychology applications based on the internet. The advantages that these new procedures have over the traditional treatments, as well as some limitations currently existent regarding the use of CITs are analysed. Finally, data about the level of satisfaction reported by patients who received a treatment program based on CITs are presented, and some future perspectives in the field are also analysed

Los tratamientos psicológicos basados en la evidencia

Lliçó inaugural del curs 2009-2010

Learning from Unstructured Data to Monitor Human Health

The integration of mobile devices into our daily lives has created unique opportunities to improve human health and well-being. Many of these devices such as smartphones and smartwatches allow the users to enter unstructured data such as speech. This research is focused on utilizing such data for health monitoring through development of computational algorithms and optimization strategies that process unstructured data, compute health-related markers, and provide recommendations for improved health. The applications of this research include nutrition monitoring, dietary recommendation, personality assessment, and commonsense reasoning. Diet is known as an important lifestyle factor in self-management and prevention of chronic diseases. Although mobile and wearable sensors have been used to estimate eating context, accurate monitoring of dietary intake has remained a challenging problem. New approaches based on mobile devices have been proposed to facilitate the process of food intake recording. These technologies require individuals to use mobile devices such as smartphones to record nutrition intake by either entering text or taking images of the food. These technologies are prone to measurement errors related to challenges of human memory and bias. In order to address these limitations, we introduced development and validation of two nutrition monitoring frameworks, Speech2Health and EZNutriPal, which use unstructured data along with speech processing, natural language processing (NLP), and text mining techniques to facilitate dietary assessment.Implementing strategies that improve dietary intake is also very important. A general diet behavior change framework for joint nutrition monitoring and diet planning allows continuous diet recommendations for achieving a diet goal. This research introduces a diet planning framework, called iTell-uEat, to provide diet recommendations continuously based on user's diet habits. Two approaches are proposed including a reinforcement-learning-based and a greedy-based diet planning. An optimization algorithm is proposed to construct a meaningful action space for training reinforcement learning algorithms. Moreover, a linear optimization approach is developed forgreedy diet planning. To demonstrate the potential of utilizing unstructured data in applications beyond dietary assessment, a computational framework is proposed to analyze human personality traits based on expressed texts and to use these personalities for behavior and commonsense reasoning analysis

MODEL, ARCHITECTURE AND APPLICATION OF CROSS-PLATFORM JUST-IN-TIME ADAPTIVE INTERVENTION (JITAI): AN IMPLEMENTATION IN BEHAVIORAL SLEEP INTERVENTION

Cognitive-behavioral therapies (CBT) are common types of non-pharmacological therapy used in treating mental illnesses and behavioral disorders. Smartphone-based interventions have the potential for improving the delivery of traditional CBT with such novel features as personalization and context awareness. Assessments and interventions are best delivered when they are personalized to fit each individual’s needs and conditions. Just in Time Adaptive Intervention (JITAI) combines this personalized and adaptive intervention with the use of mobile technology. An increasing number of studies have been conducted to assess the effect of JITAI on regulating human health behavior, however there has been no published theoretical model underlying the use of smartphones and mobile devices in relation with JITAI. Therefore, this work aimed to provide 1) a behavioral model and application architecture for JITAI, 2) implementation of the JITAI model and application architecture on behavioral sleep intervention, 3) clinical and usability outcomes of the implementation, and 4) evaluate the model and its clinical feasibility. The JITAI model, architecture and application were designed to accommodate various adaptive health/behavioral interventions. Nevertheless, in this dissertation, sleep intervention was chosen as the case study because 1) sleep is universal recurrent behavior; 2) behavioral sleep treatments are “adaptive” treatment, highly manualized and have well defined outcome measurements. This cross-platform implementation of the JITAI architecture for sleep intervention is named the interactive Resilience Enhancing Sleep Tactics (iREST). The JITAI model, architecture and application were evaluated based on the result of usability and feasibility study of iREST system (n=22). The results suggest that the system were highly usable with a mean SUS (System Usability Scale) score of 85.74. Rate of treatment response (84.21%) and remission (68.42%) were greater than those reported on previous traditional (in-person) behavioral sleep intervention trial. This finding suggests that the JITAI model and architecture are feasible tools for designing and implementing adaptive health behavior intervention through mHealth