Towards a self adaptive system for social wellness

Advancements in science and technology have highlighted the importance of robust healthcare services, lifestyle services and personalized recommendations. For this purpose patient daily life activity recognition, profile information, and patient personal experience are required. In this research work we focus on the improvement in general health and life status of the elderly through the use of an innovative services to align dietary intake with daily life and health activity information. Dynamic provisioning of personalized healthcare and life-care services are based on the patient daily life activities recognized using smart phone. To achieve this, an ontology-based approach is proposed, where all the daily life activities and patient profile information are modeled in ontology. Then the semantic context is exploited with an inference mechanism that enables fine-grained situation analysis for personalized service recommendations. A generic system architecture is proposed that facilitates context information storage and exchange, profile information, and the newly recognized activities. The system exploits the patient’s situation using semantic inference and provides recommendations for appropriate nutrition and activity related services. The proposed system is extensively evaluated for the claims and for its dynamic nature. The experimental results are very encouraging and have shown better accuracy than the existing system. The proposed system has also performed better in terms of the system support for a dynamic knowledge-base and the personalized recommendations

CoachAI: A Conversational Agent Assisted Health Coaching Platform

Poor lifestyle represents a health risk factor and is the leading cause of morbidity and chronic conditions. The impact of poor lifestyle can be significantly altered by individual behavior change. Although the current shift in healthcare towards a long lasting modifiable behavior, however, with increasing caregiver workload and individuals' continuous needs of care, there is a need to ease caregiver's work while ensuring continuous interaction with users. This paper describes the design and validation of CoachAI, a conversational agent assisted health coaching system to support health intervention delivery to individuals and groups. CoachAI instantiates a text based healthcare chatbot system that bridges the remote human coach and the users. This research provides three main contributions to the preventive healthcare and healthy lifestyle promotion: (1) it presents the conversational agent to aid the caregiver; (2) it aims to decrease caregiver's workload and enhance care given to users, by handling (automating) repetitive caregiver tasks; and (3) it presents a domain independent mobile health conversational agent for health intervention delivery. We will discuss our approach and analyze the results of a one month validation study on physical activity, healthy diet and stress management

Evaluating the impact of physical activity apps and wearables: interdisciplinary review

Background: Although many smartphone apps and wearables have been designed to improve physical activity, their rapidly evolving nature and complexity present challenges for evaluating their impact. Traditional methodologies, such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs), can be slow. To keep pace with rapid technological development, evaluations of mobile health technologies must be efficient. Rapid alternative research designs have been proposed, and efficient in-app data collection methods, including in-device sensors and device-generated logs, are available. Along with effectiveness, it is important to measure engagement (ie, users’ interaction and usage behavior) and acceptability (ie, users’ subjective perceptions and experiences) to help explain how and why apps and wearables work. Objectives: This study aimed to (1) explore the extent to which evaluations of physical activity apps and wearables: employ rapid research designs; assess engagement, acceptability, as well as effectiveness; use efficient data collection methods; and (2) describe which dimensions of engagement and acceptability are assessed. Method: An interdisciplinary scoping review using 8 databases from health and computing sciences. Included studies measured physical activity, and evaluated physical activity apps or wearables that provided sensor-based feedback. Results were analyzed using descriptive numerical summaries, chi-square testing, and qualitative thematic analysis. Results: A total of 1829 abstracts were screened, and 858 articles read in full. Of 111 included studies, 61 (55.0%) were published between 2015 and 2017. Most (55.0%, 61/111) were RCTs, and only 2 studies (1.8%) used rapid research designs: 1 single-case design and 1 multiphase optimization strategy. Other research designs included 23 (22.5%) repeated measures designs, 11 (9.9%) nonrandomized group designs, 10 (9.0%) case studies, and 4 (3.6%) observational studies. Less than one-third of the studies (32.0%, 35/111) investigated effectiveness, engagement, and acceptability together. To measure physical activity, most studies (90.1%, 101/111) employed sensors (either in-device [67.6%, 75/111] or external [23.4%, 26/111]). RCTs were more likely to employ external sensors (accelerometers: P=.005). Studies that assessed engagement (52.3%, 58/111) mostly used device-generated logs (91%, 53/58) to measure the frequency, depth, and length of engagement. Studies that assessed acceptability (57.7%, 64/111) most often used questionnaires (64%, 42/64) and/or qualitative methods (53%, 34/64) to explore appreciation, perceived effectiveness and usefulness, satisfaction, intention to continue use, and social acceptability. Some studies (14.4%, 16/111) assessed dimensions more closely related to usability (ie, burden of sensor wear and use, interface complexity, and perceived technical performance). Conclusions: The rapid increase of research into the impact of physical activity apps and wearables means that evaluation guidelines are urgently needed to promote efficiency through the use of rapid research designs, in-device sensors and user-logs to assess effectiveness, engagement, and acceptability. Screening articles was time-consuming because reporting across health and computing sciences lacked standardization. Reporting guidelines are therefore needed to facilitate the synthesis of evidence across disciplines

Building Resilience through Culturally Grounded Practices in Clinical Psychology and Higher Education

There is no “one size fits all” approach when it comes to the process of healing, particularly for individuals who are continuously affected by the many barriers and impacts of systemic oppres- sion. This reality demands the sustained development of a praxis rooted in trauma-informed and culturally grounded care so that we may better serve our most-impacted communities (such as Black, Indigenous and People of Color [BIPOC], disability, queer, and survivor communities). As practitioners in the fields of Clinical Psychology and Higher Education, we engage in cross-disciplinary analysis so that we may amplify and share our tools for collective healing. We highlight the importance of sup- porting client and student development through multisystemic and resilience-oriented frameworks. Specifically, we discuss the implications of the Minority Stress Model (Meyer, 2003) and Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (1979) in serving our communities more effectively to enhance positive clinical and academic outcomes

Empowerment or Engagement? Digital Health Technologies for Mental Healthcare

We argue that while digital health technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, smartphones, and virtual reality) present significant opportunities for improving the delivery of healthcare, key concepts that are used to evaluate and understand their impact can obscure significant ethical issues related to patient engagement and experience. Specifically, we focus on the concept of empowerment and ask whether it is adequate for addressing some significant ethical concerns that relate to digital health technologies for mental healthcare. We frame these concerns using five key ethical principles for AI ethics (i.e. autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice, and explicability), which have their roots in the bioethical literature, in order to critically evaluate the role that digital health technologies will have in the future of digital healthcare

The Summit on Creativity and Aging in America

This report looks at how the federal government can leverage the arts to foster healthy aging and inclusive design for this growing population. This white paper features recommendations from the May 2015 Summit on Creativity and Aging in America, a convening of more than 70 experts hosted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Center for Creative Aging. The paper highlights recommendations on healthy aging, lifelong learning in the arts, and age-friendly community design. The summit was a precursor to the 2015 White House Conference on Aging, which addressed four major issues: retirement security, long-term services and supports, healthy aging, and elder abuse

Wearable Computing for Health and Fitness: Exploring the Relationship between Data and Human Behaviour

Health and fitness wearable technology has recently advanced, making it easier for an individual to monitor their behaviours. Previously self generated data interacts with the user to motivate positive behaviour change, but issues arise when relating this to long term mention of wearable devices. Previous studies within this area are discussed. We also consider a new approach where data is used to support instead of motivate, through monitoring and logging to encourage reflection. Based on issues highlighted, we then make recommendations on the direction in which future work could be most beneficial

Maximizing Foundation Effectiveness: Aligning Program Strategy, Organizational Capacity, Strategic Planning, and Performance Assessment to Achieve Success

This paper outlines a framework for increasing the philanthropic performance of an organization by focusing on strategic planning and development of tight logic models for the organization's programs. Strategic planning gets broken down into five steps: meta-planning, evaluation of the internal/external environment, establishment of priorities and vision, development of the strategic plan, and implementation/refinement. Though this paper stresses evaluation and meticulous planning, it finishes by imploring organizations to "allow room for serendipity, improvisation, and intuition in the process, too.