14,357 research outputs found
Towards a Holistic Approach to Designing Theory-based Mobile Health Interventions
Increasing evidence has shown that theory-based health behavior change
interventions are more effective than non-theory-based ones. However, only a
few segments of relevant studies were theory-based, especially the studies
conducted by non-psychology researchers. On the other hand, many mobile health
interventions, even those based on the behavioral theories, may still fail in
the absence of a user-centered design process. The gap between behavioral
theories and user-centered design increases the difficulty of designing and
implementing mobile health interventions. To bridge this gap, we propose a
holistic approach to designing theory-based mobile health interventions built
on the existing theories and frameworks of three categories: (1) behavioral
theories (e.g., the Social Cognitive Theory, the Theory of Planned Behavior,
and the Health Action Process Approach), (2) the technological models and
frameworks (e.g., the Behavior Change Techniques, the Persuasive System Design
and Behavior Change Support System, and the Just-in-Time Adaptive
Interventions), and (3) the user-centered systematic approaches (e.g., the
CeHRes Roadmap, the Wendel's Approach, and the IDEAS Model). This holistic
approach provides researchers a lens to see the whole picture for developing
mobile health interventions
Depression in Low-Income Adolescents: Guidelines for School-Based Depression Intervention Programs
Adolescent depression is growing in interest to clinicians. In addition to the estimated 2 million cases of adolescent major depressive episodes each year, depressive symptoms in youth have become indicators of mental health complications later in life. Studies indicate that being low-income is a risk factor for depression and that socioeconomically disadvantaged teenagers are more than twice as likely to develop mental illnesses. Only an estimated 1 in 4 children with mental illnesses receive adequate help and 80% of these resources come through schools. Thus, this study focuses on establishing the importance of depression intervention programs in low-income high schools and designing novel guidelines for effective protocols. A compilation of expert opinion on depression screening, education, and treatment, as well as analysis of previously implemented school screening and awareness programs, are examined in order to understand key strategies. The results of this study finds that a multi-layered approach with screening, universal education, and interventions for those identified as being high-risk is most effective in addressing the mental health needs of low-income adolescents. To ensure feasibility and efficacy, screening should be conducted with a modified PHQ-a test and followed-up by timely clinical interviews by school psychologists. All students should receive universal depression education curriculum consisting of principles such as: depression literacy, asset theory, and promotion of help-seeking behaviors. Extending universal education to teachers would also be beneficial in promoting mental health communication and positive classroom environments. It is vital that those screening positive for depression or suicidality receive protocols geared towards high-risk youths, such as group Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and facilitated mental health center referrals based on individual severity. Effectively addressing depression in school systems requires integration of mental health promotion, depression prevention, and psychotherapy—by taking this multidimensional approach, public health officials and school administrations can ensure that adequate resources are directed to those most in need
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
A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Weaning of Mechanical Ventilation in Intensive Care Units
The management of invasive mechanical ventilation, and the regulation of
sedation and analgesia during ventilation, constitutes a major part of the care
of patients admitted to intensive care units. Both prolonged dependence on
mechanical ventilation and premature extubation are associated with increased
risk of complications and higher hospital costs, but clinical opinion on the
best protocol for weaning patients off of a ventilator varies. This work aims
to develop a decision support tool that uses available patient information to
predict time-to-extubation readiness and to recommend a personalized regime of
sedation dosage and ventilator support. To this end, we use off-policy
reinforcement learning algorithms to determine the best action at a given
patient state from sub-optimal historical ICU data. We compare treatment
policies from fitted Q-iteration with extremely randomized trees and with
feedforward neural networks, and demonstrate that the policies learnt show
promise in recommending weaning protocols with improved outcomes, in terms of
minimizing rates of reintubation and regulating physiological stability
A Time Like No Other: Charting the Course of the Next Revolution - A Summary of the Boston Indicators Report 2004-2006
Summarizes findings from the Boston Indicators Project, a long-term research study of the city's economic, social, and technical progress across ten sectors
Discussion quality diffuses in the digital public square
Studies of online social influence have demonstrated that friends have
important effects on many types of behavior in a wide variety of settings.
However, we know much less about how influence works among relative strangers
in digital public squares, despite important conversations happening in such
spaces. We present the results of a study on large public Facebook pages where
we randomly used two different methods--most recent and social feedback--to
order comments on posts. We find that the social feedback condition results in
higher quality viewed comments and response comments. After measuring the
average quality of comments written by users before the study, we find that
social feedback has a positive effect on response quality for both low and high
quality commenters. We draw on a theoretical framework of social norms to
explain this empirical result. In order to examine the influence mechanism
further, we measure the similarity between comments viewed and written during
the study, finding that similarity increases for the highest quality
contributors under the social feedback condition. This suggests that, in
addition to norms, some individuals may respond with increased relevance to
high-quality comments.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 2 table
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