Improving Diabetes with an Exercise Log

Diabetes is a prevalent and costly disease. Everyone benefits from physical activity, but it is particularly beneficial for people with diabetes. One method to improve motivation and adherence to physical activity may be the use of monitoring with an exercise log.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1367/thumbnail.jp

Willingness To Donate Blood During the Summer

Introduction. Each year donation rates fall in the summer months straining blood banks’ capacities to meet local demands. In hopes of identifying factors to increase summer donations, our study investigated donor reported barriers which influence summer donations habits.Methods. An anonymous 16 question survey investigating various donation factors was administered across multiple American Red Cross (ARC) donation centers in Vermont. Questions addressed donor demographics, frequency of blood donation, preference in appointment making modalities including smartphone app use, summer travel habits, willingness to donate during vacation, and factors that deter donors from donating on vacation.Results. A total of 292 surveys were received. Survey respondents across multiple demographic groups cited similar barriers to summer donation, namely “Too busy” (27.5 %) and “Traveling is a time for me to relax.” (30.6 %). Of the respondents who travel in the summer, very few reported donating while traveling (3.4 %). Summer donation rates between summertime travelers (36.5 %) and non-travelers (36.4 %) were essentially equivalent. The most preferred methods of scheduling appointments were via ARC website (45.6 %) and phone (28.4%). Willingness to use the ARC app was highest among respondents ages of 18 to 34 (45-55%) and lowest among ages 55 and older (13-15%). Of respondents with no prior knowledge of summer seasonal shortages (22 %), 2/3rds indicated newfound motivation to donate.Conclusion. Regardless of travel, increasing awareness of summer shortages may increase summer donations. Use of donor websites and smartphone apps may be instrumented as part of recruitment efforts.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1239/thumbnail.jp

Individual and Synergistic Effects of Oxytocin and Dopamine on Fluid Intelligence

Recently, the neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) has been shown to play a prominent role in social cognition, a complex ability that is composed of a variety of elements, including the ability to perceive, think about, attend to, remember, and make sense of others in the social world. It is unclear, however, if aspects of cognition mediate the relationship between OT and these social cognitive skills and, if so, whether OT acts alone or in combination with another neurotransmitter to achieve its effects. This study investigated OT’s role in modulating fluid intelligence (gF), a cognitive domain that includes the ability to reason logically and form patterns from complexity. Fluid intelligence, along with crystalized intelligence (gC) as a contrasting reference variable, was assessed using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III (WAIS-III). The Profile of Mood States (POMS) was used to control for any confounding effects of mood state on cognitive performance. In addition to OT, dopamine (DA), which is known to interact with OT in neural circuitry of relevance to social cognition, was quantified in order to gauge potential synergistic effects on fluid intelligence. Levels of each neurotransmitter was measured using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) from saliva. DA analysis was dropped due to lack of usable results from ELISA. It was found that OT levels correlate positively with gF only in men; however, this correlation is not exclusive to the gF domain. Instead, there is a broader relationship between OT and general intelligence, in which gC has a negative association with OT

Motivating, your way: Tailoring your fitness journey

A significant cardiovascular health risk is insufficient physical activity. The World Health Organization recommends 150 minutes of strenuous physical activity every week. Inadequate physical activity increases the risk of chronic diseases and other health conditions like cholesterol and obesity. This thesis researches the role of data monitoring as a persuasion strategy in monitoring a user’s progress in their journey to becoming more physically active and how it can be leveraged to decrease the risk of cardiovascular diseases. Specifically, the focus of the thesis is to determine the effectiveness of expert-generated tailored messages to motivate a user in their physical activity behaviour. We designed the content of the messages by adapting an existing ontology for tailoring motivational messages in the context of physical activity. Messages were then generated by experts through a scenario-based feedback generation process, where the scenarios were tailored to a user’s mood, self-efficacy and progress. The design of these tailored messages was tested against generic messages to determine which type of message was more motivating to the user. An experiment was conducted by recruiting crowd workers who were asked to rate the motivational levels of the two message types with respect to a given scenario. The results of the experiment supported the initial hypothesis that messages tailored to mood, self-efficacy and progress are more motivating than generic messages. Additionally, we have shown a systematic and reproducible way to obtain motivating messages. We have also provided a dataset of motivational messages that can be used during various stages of a user’s physical activity intervention, along with a set of scenarios representing different levels of a user’s state (mood, self-efficacy and progress)

Second Chance for a First Impression? Trust Development in Intelligent System Interaction

There is a growing use of intelligent systems to support human decision-making across several domains. Trust in intelligent systems, however, is pivotal in shaping their widespread adoption. Little is currently understood about how trust in an intelligent system evolves over time and how it is mediated by the accuracy of the system. We aim to address this knowledge gap by exploring trust formation over time and its relation to system accuracy. To that end, we built an intelligent house recommendation system and carried out a longitudinal study consisting of 201 participants across 3 sessions in a week. In each session, participants were tasked with finding housing that fit a given set of constraints using a conventional web interface that reflected a typical housing search website. Participants could choose to use an intelligent decision support system to help them find the right house. Depending on the group, participants received a variation of accurate or inaccurate advice from the intelligent system throughout each session. We measured trust using a trust in automation scale at the end of each session. We found evidence suggesting that trust development is a slow process that evolves over multiple sessions, and that first impressions of the intelligent system are highly influential. Our results echo earlier research on trust formation in single session interactions, corroborating that reliability, validity, predictability, and dependability all influence trust formation. We also found that the age of the participants and their affinity with technology had an effect on their trust in the intelligent system. Our findings highlight the importance of first impressions and improvement of system accuracy for trust development. Hence, our study is an important first step in understanding trust development, breakdown of trust, and trust repair over multiple system interactions, informing improved system design

To Trust or Not To Trust: How a Conversational Interface Affects Trust in a Decision Support System

Trust is an important component of human-AI relationships and plays a major role in shaping the reliance of users on online algorithmic decision support systems. With recent advances in natural language processing, text and voice-based conversational interfaces have provided users with new ways of interacting with such systems. Despite the growing applications of conversational user interfaces (CUIs), little is currently understood about the suitability of such interfaces for decision support and how CUIs inspire trust among humans engaging with decision support systems. In this work, we aim to address this gap and answer the following question: to what extent can a conversational interface build user trust in decision support systems in comparison to a conventional graphical user interface? To this end, we built a text-based conversational interface, and a conventional web-based graphical user interface. These served as the means for users to interact with an online decision support system to help them find housing, given a fixed set of constraints. To understand how the accuracy of the decision support system moderates user behavior and trust across the two interfaces, we considered an accurate and inaccurate system. We carried out a 2 × 2 between-subjects study (N = 240) on the Prolific crowdsourcing platform. Our findings show that the conversational interface was significantly more effective in building user trust and satisfaction in the online housing recommendation system when compared to the conventional web interface. Our results highlight the potential impact of conversational interfaces for trust development in decision support systems.Water ResourcesElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer ScienceWeb Information System

Feasibility of generating structured motivational messages for tailored physical activity coaching

Tailored motivational messages are helpful to motivate people in eHealth applications for increasing physical activity, but it is not sufficiently clear how such messages can be effectively generated in advance. We, therefore, put forward a theory-driven approach to generating tailored motivational messages for eHealth applications for behavior change, and we examine its feasibility by assessing how motivating the resulting messages are perceived. For this, we designed motivational messages with a specific structure that was based on an adaptation of an existing ontology for tailoring motivational messages in the context of physical activity. To obtain tailored messages, experts in health psychology and coaching successfully wrote messages with this structure for personas in scenarios that differed with regard to the persona’s mood, self-efficacy, and progress. Based on an experiment in which 60 participants each rated the perceived motivational impact of six generic and six tailored messages based on scenarios, we found credible support for our hypothesis that messages tailored to mood, self-efficacy, and progress are perceived as more motivating. A thematic analysis of people’s free-text responses about what they found motivating and demotivating about motivational messages further supports the use of tailored messages, as well as messages that are encouraging and empathetic, give feedback about people’s progress, and mention the benefits of physical activity. To aid future work on motivational messages, we make our motivational messages and corresponding scenarios publicly available.Interactive Intelligenc

Cecal Ligation and Puncture Results in Long-Term Central Nervous System Myeloid Inflammation.

Survivors of sepsis often experience long-term cognitive and functional decline. Previous studies utilizing lipopolysaccharide injection and cecal ligation and puncture in rodent models of sepsis have demonstrated changes in depressive-like behavior and learning and memory after sepsis, as well as evidence of myeloid inflammation and cytokine expression in the brain, but the long-term course of neuroinflammation after sepsis remains unclear. Here, we utilize cecal ligation and puncture with greater than 80% survival as a model of sepsis. We found that sepsis survivor mice demonstrate deficits in extinction of conditioned fear, but no acquisition of fear conditioning, nearly two months after sepsis. These cognitive changes occur in the absence of neuronal loss or changes in synaptic density in the hippocampus. Sepsis also resulted in infiltration of monocytes and neutrophils into the CNS at least two weeks after sepsis in a CCR2 independent manner. Cellular inflammation is accompanied by long-term expression of pro-inflammatory cytokine and chemokine genes, including TNFα and CCR2 ligands, in whole brain homogenates. Gene expression analysis of microglia revealed that while microglia do express anti-microbial genes and damage-associated molecular pattern molecules of the S100A family of genes at least 2 weeks after sepsis, they do not express the cytokines observed in whole brain homogenates. Our results indicate that in a naturalistic model of infection, sepsis results in long-term neuroinflammation, and that this sustained inflammation is likely due to interactions among multiple cell types, including resident microglia and peripherally derived myeloid cells

CNS myeloid inflammation is independent of peripheral monocytosis and CCR2 signaling.

<p>There was no change in the proportion of brain monocytes in CCR2^-/- mice after CLP (A). In contrast, CCR2 deficiency markedly decreases blood monocytosis (B). CCR2 deficiency has no effect on CNS (C) or blood (D) neutrophilia, as PMN do not express CCR2.</p

CLP does not result in significant changes to the structure of the hippocampus.

<p>There is no difference in the morphology of the hippocampus in 50 days after CLP (C) compared to 50 days after sham operation (B) or in age matched unoperated controls (A). There is no difference in the volume of the ventral stratum pyramidale of the cornu ammonis (D). The lack of change in hippocampal volume 50 days after CLP is concordant with the absence of FluoroJade staining, which necrotic or apoptotic cell death, 14 days after CLP (E). Positive FluoroJade staining in the hippocampus after status epilepticus is shown for comparison (F). Golgi staining was used to determine synaptic density on pyramidal cell dendrites of the dentate gyrus (G). There was no measurable difference among sham operated and post-CLP mice (H).</p