Adapting Mobile and Wearable Technology to Provide Support and Monitoring in Rehabilitation for Dementia:Feasibility Case Series

Background: Mobile and wearable devices are increasingly being used to support our everyday lives and track our behavior. Since daily support and behavior tracking are two core components of cognitive rehabilitation, such personal devices could be employed in rehabilitation approaches aimed at improving independence and engagement among people with dementia. Objective: The aim of this work was to investigate the feasibility of using smartphones and smartwatches to augment rehabilitation by providing adaptable, personalized support and objective, continuous measures of mobility and activity behavior. Methods: A feasibility study comprising 6 in-depth case studies was carried out among people with early-stage dementia and their caregivers. Participants used a smartphone and smartwatch for 8 weeks for personalized support and followed goals for quality of life. Data were collected from device sensors and logs, mobile self-reports, assessments, weekly phone calls, and interviews. This data were analyzed to evaluate the utility of sensor data generated by devices used by people with dementia in an everyday life context; this was done to compare objective measures with subjective reports of mobility and activity and to examine technology acceptance focusing on usefulness and health efficacy. Results: Adequate sensor data was generated to reveal behavioral patterns, even for minimal device use. Objective mobility and activity measures reflecting fluctuations in participants’ self-reported behavior, especially when combined, may be advantageous in revealing gradual trends and could provide detailed insights regarding goal attainment ratings. Personalized support benefited all participants to varying degrees by addressing functional, memory, safety, and psychosocial needs. A total of 4 of 6 (67%) participants felt motivated to be active by tracking their step count. One participant described a highly positive impact on mobility, anxiety, mood, and caregiver burden, mainly as a result of navigation support and location-tracking tools. Conclusions: Smartphones and wearables could provide beneficial and pervasive support and monitoring for rehabilitation among people with dementia. These results substantiate the need for further investigation on a larger scale, especially considering the inevitable presence of mobile and wearable technology in our everyday lives for years to come

Engineers are using social media for work purposes

Given the nowadays often distributed nature of product development and the tendency of engineers to rely on their colleagues and people they can easily reach, social media may offer solutions to support information seeking and efficient and effective knowledge sharing. This paper explores the use of social media in the Danish engineering industry. Results from over 130 survey participants show that 88% report to actually use social media for work purposes. The most addressed purposes are to search for information, knowledge and solutions, together with networking

Development of a Sensor-Based Behavioral Monitoring Solution to Support Dementia Care

Background: Mobile and wearable technology presents exciting opportunities for monitoring behavior using widely available sensor data. This could support clinical research and practice aimed at improving quality of life among the growing number of people with dementia. However, it requires suitable tools for measuring behavior in a natural real-life setting that can be easily implemented by others. Objective: The objectives of this study were to develop and test a set of algorithms for measuring mobility and activity and to describe a technical setup for collecting the sensor data that these algorithms require using off-the-shelf devices. Methods: A mobility measurement module was developed to extract travel trajectories and home location from raw GPS (global positioning system) data and to use this information to calculate a set of spatial, temporal, and count-based mobility metrics. Activity measurement comprises activity bout extraction from recognized activity data and daily step counts. Location, activity, and step count data were collected using smartwatches and mobile phones, relying on open-source resources as far as possible for accessing data from device sensors. The behavioral monitoring solution was evaluated among 5 healthy subjects who simultaneously logged their movements for 1 week. Results: The evaluation showed that the behavioral monitoring solution successfully measures travel trajectories and mobility metrics from location data and extracts multimodal activity bouts during travel between locations. While step count could be used to indicate overall daily activity level, a concern was raised regarding device validity for step count measurement, which was substantially higher from the smartwatches than the mobile phones. Conclusions: This study contributes to clinical research and practice by providing a comprehensive behavioral monitoring solution for use in a real-life setting that can be replicated for a range of applications where knowledge about individual mobility and activity is relevant

Feedback systems in the design and development process

Feedback is essential in the design and development process, occurring in the generation of new designs, in the adaptation of development projects to emerging information, and in coordination and collaboration of project participants—among many other aspects. Feedback also contributes to development project complexity and may cause resistance to desirable changes. But despite the importance of feedback in the design and development process (DDP), relatively few publications have examined this topic in an integrated way. This article makes two contributions towards addressing the gap. First, a conceptual framework is developed to organise perspectives on feedback in the DDP literature. The framework shows how feedback occurs at different levels of the design and development process and how it affects important DDP behaviours, namely goal-seeking, learning and emergence. Second, a system-theoretic model of feedback situations in the design and development process is introduced to synthesise key ideas. We provide concrete examples to show how this new model can be used to frame DDP situations and draw out feedback-related insight

Watch that seam! Designing hybrid presentations with data visualisation in augmented reality

Presentations with Augmented Reality (AR) are becoming an essential tool of design teams. They allow designers to more easily connect the dots leading to design ideas. However, data visualisation with AR in the context of presentations are little researched to date. This leaves two key research questions: (1) How to design an AR data visualisation in presentations? and (2) How to orchestrate seams in presentations that include AR? In order to answer these, we report an in-depth Research through Design (RtD) case study, exploring the design process of two data visualisation prototypes in HoloLens. This research process highlights the implications of including a data visualisation in AR in the presentation structure, generating the appearance of seams or transitions between media channels. Based on our findings, we make three contributions. First, we propose the concept of hybrid presentations: as a type of presentation that blends, in the same narrative, at least two media channels that combine physical and virtual media. Second, we explain how seams can be orchestrated in hybrid presentations by introducing the idea of an interaction between channel seams and narrative seams. Third, we translate these insights into concrete guidelines for designers dealing with hybrid presentations and design of data visualisations in AR

Developing systems visualisations in design through a typology of visual tasks : a mechatronic case

Visual representations are essential to design. Data-rich representations such as systems visualisations are gaining prominence in engineering practice. However, as such visualisations are often developed ad-hoc, we propose more systematically to link visual tasks with design-specific tasks for which the visualisations are used. Whereas research on such linking focuses mostly on CAD models and sketches, no such studies are yet available for systems visualisations. Thus, this paper introduces a typology of visual tasks from the Information Visualisation field to aid the development of systems visualisations in design. To build a visualisation using the typology, a case study with engineering students developing an autonomous robot was conducted. Through interviews and analysis of product representations used, design-specific tasks were identified and decomposed into visual tasks. Then, a visualisation that assisted the team in performing their design activities was created. Results illustrate the benefits of using such a typology to describe visual tasks and generate systems visualisations. The study suggests implications for researchers studying visual representations in design as well as for developers of systems visualisations

Mapping the journeys of atrial fibrillation patients and citizens using wearable devices for remote cardiac monitoring

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is one of the most prevalent cardiac diseases in the world. How might we design patient journeys improving quality of life using wearable cardiac devices for continuous out of hospital monitoring and support? Most of the studies to date have emphasised the technical aspects of implementing such devices with less focus on human factors. As such, remote cardiac monitoring appears to be burdened by poor patient adherence. This research study proposed a journey map based on Roger’s technology adoption model to understand the challenges faced by AF patients and non/asymptomatic patients in using wearable devices to monitor their health. Data from semi-structured interviews conducted in Denmark with 12 participants aged 24 to 65 years was used. Interview results show that citizens prefer tracking heart activity only in conjunction with other measures such as steps or sleep and do not feel motivated to track their heart activity on a daily basis. Patients view wearables as a valuable tool to check if their health is all right, although apprehension that devices can cause unnecessary worry can lead to their rejection. Finally, recommendations for the design of patient journeys when using wearables were made

Network-based modeling and analysis in design

In the last two decades, network science has emerged as a vibrant interdisciplinary field and has affected our understanding in many domains, including biology, physics, computer science, economics, and social sciences. One might claim that networks are now considered as a common metaphor to describe various aspects of our social and economic lives, as well as many new technologies of the last decade. Despite its success, applications of network science have, to a large extent, focused on understanding various mechanisms related to complex systems, and to a lesser extent on using this understanding as an engineering tool. As network science is coming of age, and as engineering systems are becoming more complex, it is an appropriate time to highlight network-based modeling and analysis as an important area in design research. It is in light of such a need that we introduce this Thematic Collection

Process modularity over time : modelling process execution as an evolving activity network

Process modularity describes the extent to which processes can be decomposed into modules to be executed in parallel. So far, research has approached process modularity from a static perspective, not accounting for its temporal evolution. As a result, the understanding of process modularity has been limited to inferences drawn from aggregated analyses that disregard process execution. This article introduces and develops the notion of dynamic process modularity considering the evolving activity network structure as executed by people. Drawing on network science, the article quantifies process modularity over time using archival data from an engineering design process of a biomass power plant. This article shows how studying the temporal evolution of process modularity enables a more complete understanding of activity networks, facilitates the comparison of actual process modularity patterns against formal engineering design stages, and provides data-driven decision-support for process planning and interventions. Finally, managerial recommendations for interface management, resource allocation, and process decomposition are proposed, to help practitioners better to understand and manage dynamic processes

Graph-based collaboration analysis of an agile medical engineering project with structural metrics

Agile development approaches are gaining popularity in hardware product development and medical engineering. Consequently, techniques of structural complexity management can be applied on agile projects. This paper analyses the collaboration data of a twelve-month project to design a 3D-printed microtiter plate. Exchanged e-mails, created artifacts, and conducted tasks were analyzed to identify typical barriers of inter-disciplinary collaboration. Appropriate improvement measures to overcome these barriers were suggested and evaluated in a four-hour workshop with members of the core team of the project. As a result, out of the collaboration network with 851 nodes and 9001 edges, six main barriers were identified. The most hindering barriers according to the experts' opinion were matched with appropriate improvement measures. After an assessment of the cost/benefit ratio, two measures were chosen for implementation