Technologies that motivates healthy toothbrushing: practices through social translucence

Fifty percent of the European Union’s population suffers from an oral disease. Studies have repeatedly shown that while acquiring healthy toothbrushing practices early on in one’s life is of significance, children and adults often fail to adhere to those. In this thesis we attempt to design and prototype interactive technologies that motivate healthy tooth brushing habits on individuals. Rather than focusing on the technologies’ persuasive power over individuals, we tap on the social mechanisms employed by families. In this sense, we think of these technologies as social translucent rather than persuasive, whose goal is to raise awareness within the family on each other’s habits and that aim at leveraging families’ existing social mechanisms for behavior change, rather than replacing them. More specifically, we aim to gain insights with respect to the following questions: a) What are the drivers and barriers towards adhering to healthy tooth brushing behaviors? b) Can we effectively measure toothbrushing behaviors? c) How can technologies leverage family communication practices in motivating proper toothbrushing behaviors? First, we present two studies about children and adults’ tooth brushing behaviors and how these are influenced by social interactions within the family. Secondly, we present the design and prototyping of two systems that sense toothbrushing practices and provide feedback, using the Social Translucence Framework as a design lens. We conclude with an overview of lessons learnt from the prototyping of these systems supported by an analysis of the strengths and pitfalls of the developed technologies

Small colony variants de Staphylococcus aureus nas infeções respiratórias crónicas de fibrose quística

Trabalho Final do Curso de Mestrado Integrado em Medicina, Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisboa, 2020Staphylococcus aureus é o agente oportunista mais frequentemente isolado nas secreções respiratórias dos doentes com Fibrose Quística. Esta bactéria persiste durante períodos extensos nas vias aéreas apesar de esquemas antimicrobianos agressivos e repetitivos. Durante a colonização pulmonar crónica, S. aureus é exposto a numerosas pressões seletivas impostas pelo ambiente dinâmico e hostil do pulmão de FQ, levando ao estabelecimento de uma população bacteriana heterogénea fenotípica. Small Colony Variants (SCV) é uma subpopulação bacteriana auxotrófica de crescimento lento que exibe características morfológicas, fisiológicas e metabólicas distintas, que facilitam o desenvolvimento de infeções persistentes, recorrentes e refratárias a terapêutica standard. O diagnóstico laboratorial de SCV de S. aureus representa um desafio para o microbiologista clínico, dado que requere a aplicação de métodos de diagnóstico especiais, não empregados rotineiramente pela maioria dos laboratórios clínicos de FQ. Até a data, poucos laboratórios clínicos reportam a presença de isolados de SCV de S. aureus. Estudos epidemiológicos demonstraram que doentes pediátricos tal como adultos estão frequentemente colonizados por SCV de S. aureus. A idade avançada, exposição prévia a Sulfametoxazol-trimetoprim, coinfecção com Pseudomonas aeruginosa e declínio da função pulmonar constituem fatores de risco independentes para emergência de SCV de S. aureus. São necessários mais estudos para determinar se a presença de SCV de S. aureus representa um marcador de doença pulmonar avançada ou se desempenha um papel patogénico na progressão da doença pulmonar. As implicações diagnósticas e clínicas de SCV de S. aureus enfatizam a importância na monitorização e vigilância deste fenótipo, de forma a aumentar o conhecimento do seu significado clínico na doença pulmonar na FQ.Staphylococcus aureus is the opportunist pathogen most isolated from respiratory secretions of people with Cystic Fibrosis (CF). These bacteria often persists in the airways for extended periods despite aggressive and repetitive antimicrobial regimens. During chronic lung colonization, S. aureus is exposed to numerous selective pressures imposed by the dynamic and hostile environment of the CF lung, leading to the establishment of a phenotypic heterogeneous bacterial population. Small Colony Variants (SCV) constitute a slow-growing auxotrophic bacterial subpopulation that exhibits distinctive morphological, physiological and metabolic characteristics, which facilitates the development of persistent, relapsing infections and refractory to standard antimicrobial therapy. The laboratorial diagnosis of S. aureus SCV represents a challenge for the clinical microbiologist, since it requires special diagnostics methods, not applied in routinely by most of CF clinical laboratories. To date, few clinical laboratories report the presence of S. aureus SCV isolates. Epidemiological studies demonstrated that pediatric and adults patients are commonly colonized by S. aureus SCV. Older age, prior exposition to trimethoprimsulfamethoxazole, coinfection with Pseudomonas aeruginosa and worse lung function constitute independent risk factors for the emergency of S. aureus SCV. It is necessary further studies to determinate whether the presence of SCV S. aureus represent a marker of more advanced pulmonary disease or plays a pathogenic role on pulmonary disease progression. The clinical implications of S. aureus SCV underscores the importance of surveillance and monitorization of this phenotype, in order to enhance the understanding of their clinical significance of CF pulmonary disease

CrowdWalk: Leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to inspire walking activities

Despite the initial premise of activity trackers, recent work has questioned their long-term efficacy in supporting behavior change. This paper makes two contributions. First, we present a study that inquired into individuals' ways of incorporating physical activity into their daily routines - and specifically, the "why, how, when and where" of physical activity. Secondly, we present CrowdWalk, a mobile app that leverages the wisdom of the crowd to produce location-based "walking challenges", and thus attempts to assist behavior change through highlighting opportunities for physical activity

What shall i write next? Subliminal and supraliminal priming as triggers for creative writing

Creative writing requires the manipulation of language in demanding ways, as individuals attempt to uniquely express themselves. As a result, during creative writing people often experience the writer's block: a stress reaction that affects their ability to write. Addressing this problem, creativity support tools have been incorporating story prompts to instigate the creative process. However, such strategies distract the user from the writing task and impose cognitive load to get over the block. In this paper, we investigate subliminal priming as a novel technique to support creative writing. We developed a text-editor that provides conscious and unconscious textual hints during a writing task and explored its impact on user's self-experienced creativity. Results showed that participants in the subliminal condition experienced more loss of self-consciousness when compared to the control condition. Self-report data revealed higher loss of self-consciousness in the subliminal condition while the analysis of eye-tracking data and verbal-accounts revealed a stronger influence on people's thoughts during the supraliminal condition. We report our findings and conclude with insights for future research

Social toothbrush: fostering family nudging around tooth brushing habits

The earlier in life an individual adopts healthy practices the more impact those practices have on the long term. In this paper we present Social Toothbrush, a hardware plugin for electric toothbrushes that aims to induce proper tooth brushing behaviors on young children and adults. Social Toothbrush does so by taking advantage of family communication and coordination practices to encourage healthy practices. We first describe the theoretical grounding of our design process, Social Translucence, followed by the design and development of Social Toothbrush

You have 5 seconds: designing glanceable feedback for physical activity trackers

People engage with activity trackers in short sessions: over 70% are defined by glances - brief, 5-second sessions where individuals check ongoing activity levels with no further interaction. We explore how to best leverage such short sessions to maximize positive impact on behavior. To do so, we explore the design of Glanceable Behavioral Feedback Interfaces, focusing on three directions for design: increasing the frequency of glances, increasing the impact of glances on physical activity, and promoting moments of exploration and learning with activity trackers

Why alone? Sensing children's social interactions in the playground

Inclusive education, or the idea of 'one school for all' has received wide interest in recent years, yet researchers have criticised a lack of empirical evidence on how exclusion is manifested in pupils' behaviours. This paper presents Proximy, a mobile app that senses children's social interactions during free play through sampling the Bluetooth signal strength (RSSI) of nearby devices. We present the design of Proximy and our preliminary social network analysis from a 3-week deployment with 137 seven-to-ten year old students