9 research outputs found
Multisensory Home-Monitoring in Individuals With Stable Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and Asthma: Usability Study of the CAir-Desk
Background: Research integrating multisensory home-monitoring in respiratory disease is scarce. Therefore, we created a novel multisensory home-monitoring device tailored for long-term respiratory disease management (named the CAir-Desk). We hypothesize that recent technological accomplishments can be integrated into a multisensory participant-driven platform. We also believe that this platform could improve chronic disease management and be accessible to large groups at an acceptable cost.
Objective: This study aimed to report on user adherence and acceptance as well as system functionality of the CAir-Desk in a sample of participants with stable chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or asthma.
Methods: We conducted an observational usability study. Participants took part in 4 weeks of home-monitoring with the CAir-Desk. The CAir-Desk recorded data from all participants on symptom burden, physical activity, spirometry, and environmental air quality; data on sputum production, and nocturnal cough were only recorded for participants who experienced symptoms. After the study period, participants reported on their perceptions of the usability of the monitoring device through a purpose-designed questionnaire. We used descriptive statistics and visualizations to display results.
Results: Ten participants, 5 with COPD and 5 with asthma took part in this study. They completed symptom burden questionnaires on a median of 96% (25th percentile 14%, 75th percentile 96%), spirometry recordings on 55% (20%, 94%), wrist-worn physical activity recordings on 100% (97%, 100%), arm-worn physical activity recordings on 45% (13%, 63%), nocturnal cough recordings on 34% (9%, 54%), sputum recordings on 5% (3%, 12%), and environmental air quality recordings on 100% (99%, 100%) of the study days. The participants indicated that the measurements consumed a median of 13 (10, 15) min daily, and that they preferred the wrist-worn physical activity monitor to the arm-worn physical activity monitor.
Conclusions: The CAir-Desk showed favorable technical performance and was well-accepted by our sample of participants with stable COPD and asthma. The obtained insights were used in a redesign of the CAir-Desk, which is currently applied in a randomized controlled trial including an interventional program
Auditing and Generating Synthetic Data with Controllable Trust Trade-offs
Data collected from the real world tends to be biased, unbalanced, and at
risk of exposing sensitive and private information. This reality has given rise
to the idea of creating synthetic datasets to alleviate risk, bias, harm, and
privacy concerns inherent in the real data. This concept relies on Generative
AI models to produce unbiased, privacy-preserving synthetic data while being
true to the real data. In this new paradigm, how can we tell if this approach
delivers on its promises? We present an auditing framework that offers a
holistic assessment of synthetic datasets and AI models trained on them,
centered around bias and discrimination prevention, fidelity to the real data,
utility, robustness, and privacy preservation. We showcase our framework by
auditing multiple generative models on diverse use cases, including education,
healthcare, banking, human resources, and across different modalities, from
tabular, to time-series, to natural language. Our use cases demonstrate the
importance of a holistic assessment in order to ensure compliance with
socio-technical safeguards that regulators and policymakers are increasingly
enforcing. For this purpose, we introduce the trust index that ranks multiple
synthetic datasets based on their prescribed safeguards and their desired
trade-offs. Moreover, we devise a trust-index-driven model selection and
cross-validation procedure via auditing in the training loop that we showcase
on a class of transformer models that we dub TrustFormers, across different
modalities. This trust-driven model selection allows for controllable trust
trade-offs in the resulting synthetic data. We instrument our auditing
framework with workflows that connect different stakeholders from model
development to audit and certification via a synthetic data auditing report.Comment: 49 pages; submitte
Fooling Explanations in Text Classifiers
State-of-the-art text classification models are becoming increasingly reliant
on deep neural networks (DNNs). Due to their black-box nature, faithful and
robust explanation methods need to accompany classifiers for deployment in
real-life scenarios. However, it has been shown in vision applications that
explanation methods are susceptible to local, imperceptible perturbations that
can significantly alter the explanations without changing the predicted
classes. We show here that the existence of such perturbations extends to text
classifiers as well. Specifically, we introduceTextExplanationFooler (TEF), a
novel explanation attack algorithm that alters text input samples imperceptibly
so that the outcome of widely-used explanation methods changes considerably
while leaving classifier predictions unchanged. We evaluate the performance of
the attribution robustness estimation performance in TEF on five sequence
classification datasets, utilizing three DNN architectures and three
transformer architectures for each dataset. TEF can significantly decrease the
correlation between unchanged and perturbed input attributions, which shows
that all models and explanation methods are susceptible to TEF perturbations.
Moreover, we evaluate how the perturbations transfer to other model
architectures and attribution methods, and show that TEF perturbations are also
effective in scenarios where the target model and explanation method are
unknown. Finally, we introduce a semi-universal attack that is able to compute
fast, computationally light perturbations with no knowledge of the attacked
classifier nor explanation method. Overall, our work shows that explanations in
text classifiers are very fragile and users need to carefully address their
robustness before relying on them in critical applications
A Telemonitoring and Hybrid Virtual Coaching Solution “CAir” for Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial
Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is one of the most common disorders in the world. COPD is characterized by airflow obstruction, which is not fully reversible. Patients usually experience breathing-related symptoms with periods of acute worsening and a substantial decrease in the health-related quality-of-life. Active and comprehensive disease management can slow down the progressive course of the disease and improve patients’ disabilities. Technological progress and digitalization of medicine have the potential to make elaborate interventions easily accessible and applicable to a broad spectrum of patients with COPD without increasing the costs of the intervention.
Objective: This study aims to develop a comprehensive telemonitoring and hybrid virtual coaching solution and to investigate its effects on the health-related quality of life of patients with COPD.
Methods: A monocentric, assessor-blind, two-arm (intervention/control) randomized controlled trial will be performed. Participants randomized to the control group will receive usual care and a CAir Desk (custom-built home disease-monitoring device to telemonitor disease-relevant parameters) for 12 weeks, without feedback or scores of the telemonitoring efforts and virtual coaching. Participants randomized to the intervention group will receive a CAir Desk and a hybrid digital coaching intervention for 12 weeks. As a primary outcome, we will measure the delta in the health-related quality of life, which we will assess with the St. George Respiratory Questionnaire, from baseline to week 12 (the end of the intervention).
Results: The development of the CAir Desk and virtual coach has been completed. Recruitment to the trial started in September 2020. We expect to start data collection by December 2020 and expect it to last for approximately 18 months, as we follow a multiwave approach. We expect to complete data collection by mid-2022 and plan the dissemination of the results subsequently.
Conclusions: To our knowledge, this is the first study investigating a combination of telemonitoring and hybrid virtual coaching in patients with COPD. We will investigate the effectiveness, efficacy, and usability of the proposed intervention and provide evidence to further develop app-based and chatbot-based disease monitoring and interventions in COPD
Multisensory Home-Monitoring in Individuals With Stable Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and Asthma: Usability Study of the CAir-Desk
Background: Research integrating multisensory home-monitoring in respiratory disease is scarce. Therefore, we created a novel multisensory home-monitoring device tailored for long-term respiratory disease management (named the CAir-Desk). We hypothesize that recent technological accomplishments can be integrated into a multisensory participant-driven platform. We also believe that this platform could improve chronic disease management and be accessible to large groups at an acceptable cost. Objective: This study aimed to report on user adherence and acceptance as well as system functionality of the CAir-Desk in a sample of participants with stable chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or asthma. Methods: We conducted an observational usability study. Participants took part in 4 weeks of home-monitoring with the CAir-Desk. The CAir-Desk recorded data from all participants on symptom burden, physical activity, spirometry, and environmental air quality; data on sputum production, and nocturnal cough were only recorded for participants who experienced symptoms. After the study period, participants reported on their perceptions of the usability of the monitoring device through a purpose-designed questionnaire. We used descriptive statistics and visualizations to display results. Results: Ten participants, 5 with COPD and 5 with asthma took part in this study. They completed symptom burden questionnaires on a median of 96% (25th percentile 14%, 75th percentile 96%), spirometry recordings on 55% (20%, 94%), wrist-worn physical activity recordings on 100% (97%, 100%), arm-worn physical activity recordings on 45% (13%, 63%), nocturnal cough recordings on 34% (9%, 54%), sputum recordings on 5% (3%, 12%), and environmental air quality recordings on 100% (99%, 100%) of the study days. The participants indicated that the measurements consumed a median of 13 (10, 15) min daily, and that they preferred the wrist-worn physical activity monitor to the arm-worn physical activity monitor. Conclusions: The CAir-Desk showed favorable technical performance and was well-accepted by our sample of participants with stable COPD and asthma. The obtained insights were used in a redesign of the CAir-Desk, which is currently applied in a randomized controlled trial including an interventional program.ISSN:2292-949
A Telemonitoring and Hybrid Virtual Coaching Solution "CAir" for Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial
Background: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is one of the most common disorders in the world. COPD is characterized by airflow obstruction, which is not fully reversible. Patients usually experience breathing-related symptoms with periods of acute worsening and a substantial decrease in the health-related quality-of-life. Active and comprehensive disease management can slow down the progressive course of the disease and improve patients' disabilities. Technological progress and digitalization of medicine have the potential to make elaborate interventions easily accessible and applicable to a broad spectrum of patients with COPD without increasing the costs of the intervention. Objective: This study aims to develop a comprehensive telemonitoring and hybrid virtual coaching solution and to investigate its effects on the health-related quality of life of patients with COPD. Methods: A monocentric, assessor-blind, two-arm (intervention/control) randomized controlled trial will be performed. Participants randomized to the control group will receive usual care and a CAir Desk (custom-built home disease-monitoring device to telemonitor disease-relevant parameters) for 12 weeks, without feedback or scores of the telemonitoring efforts and virtual coaching. Participants randomized to the intervention group will receive a CAir Desk and a hybrid digital coaching intervention for 12 weeks. As a primary outcome, we will measure the delta in the health-related quality of life, which we will assess with the St. George Respiratory Questionnaire, from baseline to week 12 (the end of the intervention). Results: The development of the CAir Desk and virtual coach has been completed. Recruitment to the trial started in September 2020. We expect to start data collection by December 2020 and expect it to last for approximately 18 months, as we follow a multiwave approach. We expect to complete data collection by mid-2022 and plan the dissemination of the results subsequently. Conclusions: To our knowledge, this is the first study investigating a combination of telemonitoring and hybrid virtual coaching in patients with COPD. We will investigate the effectiveness, efficacy, and usability of the proposed intervention and provide evidence to further develop app-based and chatbot-based disease monitoring and interventions in COPD
Breathing New Life into COPD Assessment: Multisensory Home-monitoring for Predicting Severity
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a significant public health issue, affecting more than 100 million people worldwide. Remote patient monitoring has shown great promise in the efficient management of patients with chronic diseases. This work presents the analysis of the data from a monitoring system developed to track COPD symptoms alongside patients’ self-reports. In particular, we investigate the assessment of COPD severity using multisensory home-monitoring device data acquired from 30 patients over a period of three months. We describe a comprehensive data pre-processing and feature engineering pipeline for multimodal data from the remote home-monitoring of COPD patients. We develop and validate predictive models forecasting i) the absolute and ii) differenced COPD Assessment Test (CAT) scores based on the multisensory data. The best obtained models achieve Pearson’s correlation coefficient of 0.93 and 0.37 for absolute and differenced CAT scores. In addition, we investigate the importance of individual sensor modalities for predicting CAT scores using group sparse regularization techniques. Our results suggest that feature groups indicative of the patient’s general condition, such as static medical and physiological information, date, spirometer, and air quality, are crucial for predicting the absolute CAT score. For predicting changes in CAT scores, sleep and physical activity features are most important, alongside the previous CAT score value. Our analysis demonstrates the potential of remote patient monitoring for COPD management and investigates which sensor modalities are most indicative of COPD severity as assessed by the CAT score. Our findings contribute to the development of effective and data-driven COPD management strategies