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

Athletes' use of sport video games to enhance athletic performance

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, February 2010."October 2009." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-94).A design feature of contemporary sport video games allows elite athletes to play as themselves in life-like representations of actual sporting events. The relation between playing sport video games and actual physical performance has not yet been established. Drawing on data from interviews and observations of elite athletes playing sport video games, this thesis explores why elite athletes are playing these video games as their virtual selves, and establishes a framework for understanding how this play may enhance learning opportunities. Building on theories based in the disciplines of psychoanalysis, education, and neuroscience, this thesis argues that virtual play by athletes playing as themselves in sport video games has the potential to support and encourage physical performance.by Lauren Silberman.S.M

The impact of video-based practice on the development of elite youth footballers

Whilst video is increasingly recognized and utilized within elite sport settings as an appropriate medium for delivering information about performance (MacRae, Miller-Perrin, & Tinberg, 2003), the exact role of the video as a development tool within youth football remains unclear (Groom, Cushion & Nelson, 2011). It is argued that further research is needed which is grounded in the day-to-day realities of the players, coaches and practitioners using video to develop players for senior football. Drawing from a wide range of scientific disciplines, the term ‘video-based practice’ is employed throughout this research to represent the overall activities and processes surrounding video delivery in youth football settings. The main aim of this research project was to gain an in-depth understanding of video-based practice within elite youth football. Mixed-methods were undertaken to tackle these applied research questions. Forming a two-part investigation, study one focused on developing an understanding the perspectives of the key participants in the VFB process within youth football. Interviews were conducted with eleven coaches and twelve players currently based with elite youth football environments. A thematic content analysis yielded rich data pertaining to their perceptions of the factors involved in the delivery of video feedback within youth football. In study 1a with coaches, 421 distinct raw-data quotes were abstracted into 111 lower-order themes, and 17 higher-order themes; while in study 1b with players, 490 distinct raw-data quotes were abstracted into 104 lower-order themes, and 16 higher-order themes. These higher order themes were grouped together under three general dimensions. These focused on (i) the psychological processes engaged during delivery, (ii) the impact of using different delivery strategies, and (iii) the impact of the delivery climate surrounding video- ii based practice. Whilst a broad range of common themes were identified, the findings also highlighted differences in the way coaches and players perceived the VFB delivery process. In the second part of this research, the emphasis shifted from exploring the factors influencing delivery, to directly exploring their impact from within elite youth football settings. In study two, an ‘individual-focused’ video intervention – based on the tenets of self-modeling theory - was delivered to five players within a single-case design to explore its effect on subcomponents of performance and selected psychological variables during a competitive football season. The findings were mixed. Whilst positive changes were observed on certain subcomponents of performance for three of the four players who received the video intervention, the findings showed that no impact was observed for other subcomponents. The findings also highlight the potential mediating influence of a number of psychological variables in the video-performance relationship, including self-efficacy, affect, imagery and motivation. Finally, in study three, a two-year narrative-based reflective piece is presented of the principal researchers’ experiences working as an practitioner within video-based practice within an elite professional youth football setting. Using reflective journals and observations in the field, a number of practical, philosophical and ethical issues were explored through the perspective of the coach-practitioner relationship. Overall, the findings of this thesis reveal the central importance of psychological factors in influencing the effectiveness of video-based practice in youth football, and suggest that the skill and expertise of the Sport Psychologist may add significant value to video-based practice alongside the coach and performance analysis practitioner

Quantifying Quality of Life

Describes technological methods and tools for objective and quantitative assessment of QoL Appraises technology-enabled methods for incorporating QoL measurements in medicine Highlights the success factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods This open access book presents the rise of technology-enabled methods and tools for objective, quantitative assessment of Quality of Life (QoL), while following the WHOQOL model. It is an in-depth resource describing and examining state-of-the-art, minimally obtrusive, ubiquitous technologies. Highlighting the required factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods and tools for QoL assessment, it also describes how these technologies can be leveraged for behavior change, disease prevention, health management and long-term QoL enhancement in populations at large. Quantifying Quality of Life: Incorporating Daily Life into Medicine fills a gap in the field of QoL by providing assessment methods, techniques and tools. These assessments differ from the current methods that are now mostly infrequent, subjective, qualitative, memory-based, context-poor and sparse. Therefore, it is an ideal resource for physicians, physicians in training, software and hardware developers, computer scientists, data scientists, behavioural scientists, entrepreneurs, healthcare leaders and administrators who are seeking an up-to-date resource on this subject

Listening to Teachers’ Needs: Human-centred Design for Mobile Technology in Higher Education

Technology is developing fast. Especially mobile and wearable technology is on the rise. Educational technology has seen considerable developments in different technological areas recently. However, the vast development of everyday technology is not reflected in educational settings and the fast adaption of innovative technology is missing in the educational sector. This thesis applies a Human-centred Design (HCD) process to analyze the context of teaching in higher education, to understand teachers’ needs and requirements to design innovative and up-to-date technology. It was found that teachers lack motivation to integrate technology into their teaching processes. Learning tasks were found to be a critical component in teaching and learning processes. Therefore, the support of teaching processes around learning tasks was chosen as the central problem in this thesis. The use case of alpine sport teaching was chosen for an in depth analysis of learning tasks. To address the motivational problem, gamification was taken into consideration. Games are known for their motivational factors and effects. Due to the similarities between learning tasks and game tasks, an extensive analysis on how to design for motivating tasks based on lessons learned from game tasks was conducted. The findings include that certain game elements, structures and processes can be used to design for motivating learning tasks. From the context of use analysis in teaching and the findings from the game analyses, the Dynamic Questing (DynQ) concept was developed. The DynQ concept consists of learning task creation, task triggering, context sensing and feedback generation. A proof-of-concept prototype was developed to test out the DynQ concept and to be used for user testing with alpine sports teachers. After that, the concept was also tested with teachers from different teaching contexts. Further design and development of the system could help improve usability and user experience. This work forms a basis for the advancement of personalized and contextualized learning through mobile and wearable technology support.publishedVersio

Quantifying Quality of Life

Describes technological methods and tools for objective and quantitative assessment of QoL Appraises technology-enabled methods for incorporating QoL measurements in medicine Highlights the success factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods This open access book presents the rise of technology-enabled methods and tools for objective, quantitative assessment of Quality of Life (QoL), while following the WHOQOL model. It is an in-depth resource describing and examining state-of-the-art, minimally obtrusive, ubiquitous technologies. Highlighting the required factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods and tools for QoL assessment, it also describes how these technologies can be leveraged for behavior change, disease prevention, health management and long-term QoL enhancement in populations at large. Quantifying Quality of Life: Incorporating Daily Life into Medicine fills a gap in the field of QoL by providing assessment methods, techniques and tools. These assessments differ from the current methods that are now mostly infrequent, subjective, qualitative, memory-based, context-poor and sparse. Therefore, it is an ideal resource for physicians, physicians in training, software and hardware developers, computer scientists, data scientists, behavioural scientists, entrepreneurs, healthcare leaders and administrators who are seeking an up-to-date resource on this subject

Discovering the New Place of Learning

The book explores the potential of learning outside the traditional classroom when students gain real-world experiences in a variety of contexts and public spaces such as built, natural and virtual landscapes, museums, heritage sites, science centres and community venues. The authors of the book promote and put the flexible and ‘plastic’ concept of a place of learning into action by including physical geographical location, digital, virtual and textual spaces into the analysis. The book illuminates the importance of innovative educational strategies in connecting formal, non-formal and informal education – experiential learning in museums, heritage places and communities, inquiry-based pedagogy, digital storytelling, environmental online games, narrative geographies, and the use of geospatial technologies