Framework to Evaluate Emerging Systems Designed to Health Field

In recent years, several information and communication technology systems have emerged as tools to improve sleep quality. Research reveals that poor sleep quality may produce irritability and deficits in performance, concentration, and learning ability in the short term, and is associated with chronic disease in the long term. ICT proposals range from the old Polysomnography (PSG) to innovative systems, such as wearable devices, smartphone applications, and suites of sensors embedded in the users’ environment. Since these technological developments concern a health issue, they have raised important questions regarding their reliability and the level of rigor of the evaluations to which they are submitted. We found that some of the emerging systems that we studied, do not meet the requirements that health science demands to be accepted as clinical tools. The rationale behind this apparent weakness is explained with arguments from the field of evaluations for health interventions and evaluation of technological developments. We propose a framework to evaluate this kind of systems through appropriate scientific methods that provide valuable information to the research. These methods must be performed while designs mature and the feasibility of rigorous evaluations became appropriate

MobAppGen (une plateforme modulaire pour la génération des applications mobiles)

The advance of mobile telephony and mobile devices has created the need of a fast and effective implementation of new services and applications. This project is focused on the definition and deployment of a generic framework conceived to facilitate the development of mobile applications. This framework is called MobAppGen that stands for Mobile Applications Generator. It is a modular and extendable framework for client-only and client-server mobile applications generation. It was conceived considering that most mobile applications require similar basis, including: screen management, data persistence and network communication. In this way the framework allows the creation of applications based on reusable software components defined as modules. Therefore, MobAppGen consists of several modules with specific attributes that can be reused for different projects or can be adapted as is needed. Each module implements a basic task, and is adaptable to specific jobs by changing its attributes. A project generated with our framework can consist of one or several applications generated with similar or different modules. Similar module's applications will share basic source classes, helping to reduce the size of the project. The modules are aimed to create several useful projects including a streaming system using the RTSP protocol. This last module offers also a solution to implement streaming on mobile devices without requiring a native application and even if they originally lack of streaming features. To develop our framework we selected a deployment environment that runs on as many types of devices as possible as well as open standards to allow future extensions and code mobility. Finally, several tests were done to evaluate the framework's performance as well as the behaviour of the generated applications.EVRY-INT (912282302) / SudocPARIS-BIUSJ-Mathématiques rech (751052111) / SudocSudocFranceF

Development of an e-Coaching Framework to Promote Sleep Hygiene Using Machine Learning

Computational sciences have gradually allowed scientists to develop novel technological projects to promote a healthy way of life. Most efforts have focus in promoting healthy diets and physical activity. Sleeping is also a crucial activity for humans. Poor sleep quality has adverse effects on health and might lead to physical and mental deterioration. Many computer systems have been used to measure sleep quantity and quality; however, there are few efforts to guide users about aspects that can influence sleeping. Sleep hygiene is a concept that allows controlling sleep-related habits and promoting good sleep quality; unfortunately, modern lifestyles can cause people to adopt wrong habits without being aware of their impact on sleep quality. This work describes a framework developed to guide user’s during the day in order to achieve good sleep quality during sleep time. A set of sleep hygiene factors (SHFs) intended to control hours before going to sleep was defined. The framework identifies personal SHFs using machine learning algorithms; furthermore, a new algorithm was designed to improve results. The framework also includes a mobile persuasive system to encourage users to control personal SHFs.</p

Development of an e-Coaching Framework to Promote Sleep Hygiene Using Machine Learning

Computational sciences have gradually allowed scientists to develop novel technological projects to promote a healthy way of life. Most efforts have focus in promoting healthy diets and physical activity. Sleeping is also a crucial activity for humans. Poor sleep quality has adverse effects on health and might lead to physical and mental deterioration. Many computer systems have been used to measure sleep quantity and quality; however, there are few efforts to guide users about aspects that can influence sleeping. Sleep hygiene is a concept that allows controlling sleep-related habits and promoting good sleep quality; unfortunately, modern lifestyles can cause people to adopt wrong habits without being aware of their impact on sleep quality. This work describes a framework developed to guide user’s during the day in order to achieve good sleep quality during sleep time. A set of sleep hygiene factors (SHFs) intended to control hours before going to sleep was defined. The framework identifies personal SHFs using machine learning algorithms; furthermore, a new algorithm was designed to improve results. The framework also includes a mobile persuasive system to encourage users to control personal SHFs

mHealth Platform and Architectures to Provide Nutritional Guidance to Children

Obesity and eating disorders in children are major problems worldwide. To promote their future well-being, it is important to educate children and teenagers about healthy lifestyle choices. Mobile technology offers many opportunities for helping to prevent health problems; however, the sole use of stand-alone applications is insufficient to improve childrenâ??s health awareness because children require proper orientation from adults. In this paper, we present a mobile platform intended to provide nutrition guidance to children and architectures for implementing this platform in an elementary school environment. These architectures provide data capturing and user interfaces that are especially suited for children, and they permit adults to send and receive notifications and messages to improve results

Prioritization-Driven Congestion Control in Networks for the Internet of Medical Things: A Cross-Layer Proposal

Real-life implementation of the Internet of Things (IoT) in healthcare requires sufficient quality of service (QoS) to transmit the collected data successfully. However, unsolved challenges in prioritization and congestion issues limit the functionality of IoT networks by increasing the likelihood of packet loss, latency, and high-power consumption in healthcare systems. This study proposes a priority-based cross-layer congestion control protocol called QCCP, which is managed by communication devices’ transport and medium access control (MAC) layers. Unlike existing methods, the novelty of QCCP is how it estimates and resolves wireless channel congestion because it does not generate control packets, operates in a distributed manner, and only has a one-bit overhead. Furthermore, at the same time, QCCP offers packet scheduling considering each packet’s network load and QoS. The results of the experiments demonstrated that with a 95% confidence level, QCCP achieves sufficient performance to support the QoS requirements for the transmission of health signals. Finally, the comparison study shows that QCCP outperforms other TCP protocols, with 64.31% higher throughput, 18.66% less packet loss, and 47.87% less latency

Characteristics of a Persuasive Educational System: A Systematic Literature Review

The need to compete for users’ attention and provide them with the best user experience has increased the use of persuasion strategies in modern systems. Currently, Persuasive Systems (PSs) promote healthy behavior for well-being, energy consumption, and learning. Although the educational domain has limited investigation compared to other areas, PSs in education have been shown to be effective in motivating students. This paper summarizes the existing evidence on Persuasive Educational Systems (PESs), emphasizing research on the current design methods, evaluation methods, and characteristics. We follow Kitchenham’s method to perform a systematic literature review about PESs published between 2014 and 2020, with 19 relevant studies selected. We highlight some results from the analysis of selected papers such as persuasion strategies, use of a personalized persuasion technique, study of students’ susceptibility to strategies, integration of gamification mechanisms, and proposed tools to design PES. Moreover, we discuss interesting facts such as the common practice of using more than one tool to design PES, aspects of interaction, persuasion, learning, and the challenges in evaluating persuasive impact. Finally, as the main contribution of the paper we identify the seven necessary characteristics to build a persuasive educational system

Monitoring Atrial Fibrillation using PPG Signals and a Smartphone

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a  common type of cardiac arrhythmia. AF is associated with increased rates of death and hospitalizations. It is also related to a degraded quality of life and reduced exercise capacity. Ageing increases the risk of developing AF, as well as hypertension and obesity. Continuous ECG monitoring is required in patients with previously diagnosed AF. Studies have also demonstrated that daily ECG monitoring increases the successful detection of silent AF among older adults. In this sense facilitating AF monitoring using portable devices such as Smartphones will increase patients life quality and could help to an early diagnosis. With this in mind in this work we present a proposal to detect AF using pulsatile photoplethysmogram (PPG) signal from a fingertip using the built-in camera lens in a smartphone. We developed an algorithm intended to sense paroxysmal AF considering resource utilization capabilities in order to be used in mobile devices with constrained