A rapidly moving target: Conformance with e-health standards for mobile computing

The rapid adoption and evolution of mobile applications in health is posing significant challenges in terms of standards development, standards adoption, patient safety, and patient privacy. This is a complex continuum to navigate. There are many competing demands from the standards development process, to the use by clinicians and patients. In between there are compliance and conformance measures to be defined to ensure patient safety, effective use with integration into clinical workflow, and the protection of data and patient privacy involved in data collection and exchange. The result is a composite and intricate mixture of stakeholders, legislation, and policy together with national and individual perspectives. The challenges for standards development are numerous and include the cross over from traditional medical devices and mobile devices with apps, as well as harmonisation for consistent semantic terminology, and the diverse range of standards required in mobile health solutions. These issues affect the ability of conformance and compliance to be undertaken. Additionally, the need for interoperability in development of safe and secure mHealth software whilst being mindful of the implications for patient safety is vital. Conformance and compliance to established international standards is the first and, at present, the only step in meeting the mobile health challenges

Can Common Sense uncover cultural differences in computer applications?

Cultural differences play a very important role in matching computer interfaces to the expectations of users from different national and cultural backgrounds. But to date, there has been little systematic research as to the extent of such differences, and how to produce software that automatically takes into account these differences. We are studying these issues using a unique resource: Common Sense knowledge bases in different languages. Our research points out that this kind of knowledge can help computer systems to consider cultural differences. We describe our experiences with knowledge bases containing thousands of sentences describing people and everyday activities, collected from volunteer Web contributors in three different cultures: Brazil, Mexico and the USA, and software which automatically searches for cultural differences amongst the three cultures, alerting the user to potential differences.IFIP International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Theory and Practice - Knowledge and Information ManagementRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Impacto da vacinação contra varicela nos índices de morbimortalidade no Brasil / Impact of chickenpox vaccination on morbidity and mortality rates in Brazil

A infecção primária pelo vírus varicela-zoster (VZV) é responsável pelo desenvolvimento da doença conhecida como varicela ou catapora, a qual ocorre comumente na infância e é altamente contagiosa. No Brasil, desde setembro de 2013 o Ministério da Saúde por meio do Programa Nacional de Imunizações (PNI), introduziu a vacina tetravalente viral (sarampo, caxumba, rubéola e varicela) com o objetivo de reduzir a morbimortalidade causada por este vírus. O objetivo deste trabalho foi descrever o perfil epidemiológico dos casos notificados e avaliar o impacto do programa de vacinação sobre a morbimortalidade da varicela no Brasil antes e após a introdução da vacina no Sistema Único de Saúde. Incluímos pessoas de ambos os sexos, menores de dez anos, com varicela, cujas informações epidemiológicas e de morbimortalidade foram inseridas no Departamento de Informática do SUS, no período de 2008 a 2018, para comparação dos casos notificados nos períodos pré e pós-vacinal. As internações associadas ao vírus varicela-zoster no Brasil no período pré-vacinal foram de 27.902, com maior ocorrência na região Sudeste. No período pós-vacinal ocorreram 13.759 internações resultando em uma redução de 50,1% quando comparado ao período pré-vacinal. A faixa etária com a maior frequência de casos em ambos os períodos foi de um a quatro anos (15.337 - 55% e 6.597 - 48% casos, respectivamente), seguida do grupo de menores de um ano (7.822 - 28% e 3,606 - 26%, respectivamente). Contudo, a taxa de mortalidade foi maior na faixa etária de menores de um ano em ambos os períodos (102 óbitos no período pré-vacinal e 57 no pós-vacinal). Embora tenha ocorrido redução no número absoluto de óbitos em todas as faixas etárias ao comparar os dois períodos, observou-se um aumento de óbitos em taxas percentuais em menores de um ano de idade (53,4% - pré-vacinal e 58,8% - pós-vacinal). A introdução da vacina tetravalente viral pelo SUS diminuiu consideravelmente as hospitalizações e óbitos por varicela no grupo etário alvo da vacinação, demonstrando a eficácia da vacina. Todavia ainda há a necessidade de realização de estudos multicêntricos objetivando o aprimoramento e ajuste das estratégias vacinais de acordo com a realidade brasileira para a manutenção de uma taxa de cobertura vacinal eficiente contra varicela e outros agravos imunopreveníveis por vacinas

Design of Therapeutic Information Systems as Indicating Through Signs

Part 5: Trends, Challenges and New Issues in Education, Health and eScience SystemsInternational audienceTherapeutic information systems are tools to support healthcare professionals to treat their patients, aiding on their rehabilitation, helping them to understand their condition and the treatment procedures, or even motivating themselves to persist on ongoing treatments. Although the importance of digital therapeutic systems, the design of this type of system is still a challenge. Inspired by the Organizational Semiotics, Baranauskas and Bonacin proposed a framework to conduct work in interactive systems design. In the proposed approach, these authors argue in favor of designing as a social process which focuses on problem setting as well as on problem solving. This paper brings reflections of an instantiation of this framework in the context of therapeutic systems and presents the results of an application in a real scenario with patients affected in their mental health

Studies in Organisational Semiotics: A Systematic Literature Review

Part 1: Organisational Semiotics: Theory and ResearchInternational audienceOrganizational Semiotics (OS) is a discipline that supports analyzing and modeling organizations as Information Systems (IS). This paper investigates the use of OS theories in studies published in the last five years, aiming to identify how researchers have been employing the OS theory and the current approaches derived from OS. In this sense, we conducted a systematic review in four scientific databases. Starting with an initial set of 91 papers, we selected 53 for this review. The results suggest almost twenty new modeling approaches using OS artifacts and ideas. Moreover, the number of publications has been increasing and publications have occurred in several different journals and conference proceedings

Human-Centred Technology for Sustainable Development Goals: Challenges and Opportunities

A human-centred approach to technology design for addressing sustainable development goals demands rethinking the way technological solutions are developed and deployed, taking into account situated design solutions and their impact on the social, economic and environmental aspects. For technology designers, this provides an opportunity to bridge the gap between the real and the ideal worlds. This workshop aims at building an agenda that defines challenges and opportunities for the design of interactive technologies, which promote fairness and prosperity on the planet, and contribute towards one or more of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals

Classificação da qualidade da argumentação em tweets no domínio da política brasileira

A argumentação é uma habilidade inerente à comunicação humana, tanto em situações orais quanto escritas. Argumentos bem fundamentados são importantes para amparar a tomada de decisões e aprendizado, assim como para a obtenção de conclusões amplamente aceitas. Como área de pesquisa, a argumentação é um campo multidisciplinar que estuda os processos de debate e raciocínio. Em linguística computacional, investigações têm sido realizadas para (i) identificar argumentos e suas unidades e (ii) gerar ou (iii) avaliar a qualidade dos argumentos. No entanto, a maioria dos trabalhos atuais se concentra na mineração de argumentos em textos formais em inglês. Neste artigo, foi avaliada a qualidade da argumentação em tweets de domínio político, escritos em português do Brasil, usando algoritmos tradicionais de aprendizado de máquina -- como Regressão Logística, K-Nearest Neighbors, Árvores de Decisão, Máquinas de Vetores Suporte (SVM), Floresta Aleatória e Naive Bayes -- e também um ajuste fino de dois modelos neurais (BERTimbau e RobertaTwitterBR). Além de trazer resultados práticos para a avaliação da qualidade da argumentação em um gênero textual desafiador, como o Twitter, e em um domínio controverso, como a política brasileira, este artigo também visa suprir a carência de trabalhos que avaliem automaticamente a qualidade dos argumentos em português. Dentre os algoritmos de classificação avaliados, o modelo obtido a partir do ajuste fino do BERTimbau apresentou os melhores resultados com uma precisão de 69,65\% quando foram consideradas todas as classes e de 100,00\% para as mensagens de alta qualidade de argumentação

Human-Centred Technology for Sustainable Development Goals - Workshop Results

This paper presents the results of the workshop on Human-centred Technologies for Sustainable Development Goals (HCT4SDG) - Challenges and Opportunities. The workshop was part of the 18th International Conference promoted by the IFIP Technical Committee 13 on Human-Computer Interaction (Interact 2021). Nine papers were presented by authors from several different countries and discussed in the workshop. Six of these papers were extended in this proceedings. After discussion, seven challenges and eight research opportunities were listed as expression of the participants’ views on HCT4SDG

College students-in-the-loop for their mental health: a case of AI and humans working together to support well-being

Technology plays a relevant role in mental health. Specifically, integrating pervasive technologies with artificial intelligence (AI) holds promising potential to collect users’ data, monitor individuals daily, and support treatment. However, the lack of trust in the collected data is a common limitation of prior work on mental health and technology. This paper proposes involving the user in a Human-in-the-loop approach as a solution to deal with the lack of accuracy of data collected through pervasive technology. In our study, end users judged and evaluated the data collected at two different times: before training the computational model, which would be later used for classification; and afterward to evaluate newly collected data that would be predicted and classified by the model. The solution proposed was implemented and tested in a project related to depression in college students. The results indicate positive reactions to the predicted classifications

Can common sense uncover cultural differences in computer applications

Abstract. Cultural differences play a very important role in matching computer interfaces to the expectations of users from different national and cultural backgrounds. But to date, there has been little systematic research as to the extent of such differences, and how to produce software that automatically takes into account these differences. We are studying these issues using a unique resource: Common Sense knowledge bases in different languages. Our research points out that this kind of knowledge can help computer systems to consider cultural differences. We describe our experiences with knowledge bases containing thousands of sentences describing people and everyday activities, collected from volunteer Web contributors in three different cultures: Brazil, Mexico and the USA, and software which automatically searches for cultural differences amongst the three cultures, alerting the user to potential differences. 1