Mining Activity Tracker Data To Analyse Physical Activity Behaviours And Provide Personalised Feedback In Health Education Programmes

The use of activity trackers in health education offers great potential to objectively assess healthy behaviour learning. However, the current models and techniques used to exploit and analyse their data mainly compare highly aggregated amounts of physical activity, thus diluting the fine physical activity patterns contained in the granular tracker data. The extraction of these latent patterns is valuable for health education because they may help to better understand how interventions affect behaviours and how they change over time. Physical activity patterns offer a more detailed view of how participants learn and offer the possibility to encourage healthy behaviours when detected on time. This thesis proposes data mining models and techniques to extract these finer physical activity patterns that can then be used to analyse physical activity behaviours. This allows performing elaborate intervention assessments and generating timely personalised feedback during interventions. In Chapter 1, we introduce the research questions and objectives. In Chapter 2, we present a systematic literature review of the current state of data mining techniques that use physical activity sensor data in health education to detect behaviour changes. We discuss common challenges and opportunities to guide future work. In Chapter 3, we propose a data mining method that highlights the nature and timing of behaviour changes for a more insightful assessment of health interventions. In Chapter 4, we describe U-BEHAVED, an unsupervised machine learning technique to detect significant physical activity behaviour changes and to determine whether they become habitual as the health intervention unfolds. In Chapter 5, we model physical activity behaviour changes to provide personalised feedback. Finally, we discuss our work and describe how it answered the research questions

Phenomenological Study on Use of Sports and Exercise for Veterans with PTSD

This phenomenological research was intended to explore the effectiveness of sports and exercise to decrease or manage D-PTSD symptoms in veterans. The study was framed around four research questions: How do veterans describe the impact sports and exercise have on their D- PTSD?, When there are PTSD symptoms being experienced prior to engaging in a sport or exercise, how does the veteran feel after the sport or exercise is completed?, What do veterans describe as the primary catalyst that draws them to engage in combative sports?, What is the holistic connectedness with sports and exercise for veterans with D- PTSD and how are those defined? Participants were twice observed in person in their activity routine and interviewed before and after each activity. Cognitive images of their PTSD and responses to questions about the image were requested. Three themes emerged from examination of veterans’ personal narratives regarding the use of sports and exercise (including combative sports) in managing D-PTSD symptoms: effects of activity, military resemblance, and confronting triggers. The study contributes to the existing literature by introducing a new way to examine how combative sports may provide an effective alternative treatment for D-PTSD

Ubiquitous computing and natural interfaces for environmental information

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, perfil Gestão e Sistemas AmbientaisThe next computing revolution‘s objective is to embed every street, building, room and object with computational power. Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) will allow every object to receive and transmit information, sense its surroundings and act accordingly, be located from anywhere in the world, connect every person. Everyone will have the possibility to access information, despite their age, computer knowledge, literacy or physical impairment. It will impact the world in a profound way, empowering mankind, improving the environment, but will also create new challenges that our society, economy, health and global environment will have to overcome. Negative impacts have to be identified and dealt with in advance. Despite these concerns, environmental studies have been mostly absent from discussions on the new paradigm. This thesis seeks to examine ubiquitous computing, its technological emergence, raise awareness towards future impacts and explore the design of new interfaces and rich interaction modes. Environmental information is approached as an area which may greatly benefit from ubicomp as a way to gather, treat and disseminate it, simultaneously complying with the Aarhus convention. In an educational context, new media are poised to revolutionize the way we perceive, learn and interact with environmental information. cUbiq is presented as a natural interface to access that information