Impact of COVID-19 on the psychological health of university students in Spain and their attitudes toward Mobile mental health solutions

Producción CientíficaAntecedentes: La pandemia originada por el COVID-19 ha tenido un impacto en varios aspectos de la vida, incluida la salud mental de los estudiantes universitarios. Las aplicaciones móviles de atención mental (apps) permiten una forma de atención mental en línea que permite la prestación de atención mental a distancia. Objetivos: Este estudio tuvo como objetivo principal explorar el impacto de COVID-19 en la salud mental de estudiantes universitarios en España y explorar sus actitudes hacia el uso de aplicaciones móviles de atención mental. Metodología: Los encuestados respondieron una encuesta, que constaba de dos secciones. El primero incluía el Cuestionario de Salud General de 12 ítems (GHQ-12) que se empleó para evaluar la salud mental de los estudiantes. La segunda sección incluía seis preguntas desarrolladas por los autores para explorar las actitudes de los estudiantes hacia las aplicaciones de atención mental. Resultados: Los resultados mostraron que los estudiantes padecían ansiedad y depresión, así como disfunción social. Además, el 91,3 % de los estudiantes nunca había usado una aplicación móvil para la salud mental, el 36,3 % desconocía dichas aplicaciones y el 79,2 % estaba dispuesto a usarlas en el futuro. Conclusiones: La pandemia de COVID-19 tuvo un impacto significativo en la salud psicológica de los estudiantes universitarios. Las aplicaciones móviles de atención mental pueden ser una forma eficaz y eficiente de acceder a la atención mental, especialmente durante una pandemia

Cooperative learning of requirements engineering through an international educational scenario enabled by the MOY programme

The International Excellence Campus for Higher Education and Research of the Region of Murcia, and the Mediterranean Office for Youth (MOY) programme are new initiatives that offer opportunities for designing educational activities in which can take part international students enrolled in academic degrees at different universities. Besides, a significant rise in distributed and collaborative software development has been observed in recent years (Global Software Development, GSD), which involves space, time and socio-cultural distances and requires new techniques, tools and practices to meet new challenges and opportunities. In addition, poor requirements are one of the most common causes of project failure in any domain. Projects which devote more resources to Requirements Engineering (RE) result in lower costs and lower deviations of their planning. Therefore, the relevance of education and training the future systems and software professionals in RE activities and techniques, in particular in GSD environments, must be stressed. We have conducted an educational innovation activity based on teaching RE in co-located and GSD contexts. This activity has been carried out in the form of an experiment with students. This paper presents the scenario in which this educational activity is framed as well as some preliminary results of this experiment

End-to-End AI-Based Point-of-Care Diagnosis System for Classifying Respiratory Illnesses and Early Detection of COVID-19: A Theoretical Framework

Respiratory symptoms can be caused by different underlying conditions, and are often caused by viral infections, such as Influenza-like illnesses or other emerging viruses like the Coronavirus. These respiratory viruses, often, have common symptoms: coughing, high temperature, congested nose, and difficulty breathing. However, early diagnosis of the type of the virus, can be crucial, especially in cases, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the factors that contributed to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic were the late diagnosis or misinterpretation of COVID-19 symptoms as regular flu-like symptoms. Research has shown that one of the possible differentiators of the underlying causes of different respiratory diseases could be the cough sound, which comes in different types and forms. A reliable lab-free tool for early and accurate diagnosis, which can differentiate between different respiratory diseases is therefore very much needed, particularly during the current pandemic. This concept paper discusses a medical hypothesis of an end-to-end portable system that can record data from patients with symptoms, including coughs (voluntary or involuntary) and translate them into health data for diagnosis, and with the aid of machine learning, classify them into different respiratory illnesses, including COVID-19. With the ongoing efforts to stop the spread of the COVID-19 disease everywhere today, and against similar diseases in the future, our proposed low cost and user-friendly theoretical solution could play an important part in the early diagnosis

Connected Health User Willingness to Share Personal Health Data: Questionnaire Study

Abstract Background: Connected health has created opportunities for leveraging health data to deliver preventive and personalized health care services. The increasing number of personal devices and advances in measurement technologies contribute to an exponential growth in digital health data. The practices for sharing data across the health ecosystem are evolving as there are more opportunities for using such data to deliver responsive health services. Objective: The objective of this study was to explore user attitudes toward sharing personal health data (PHD). The study was executed within the first year after the implementation of the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) legal framework. Methods: The authors analyzed the results of an online questionnaire survey to explore the willingness of 8004 people using connected health services across four European countries to share their PHD and the conditions under which they would be willing to do so. Results: Our findings indicate that the majority of users are willing to share their personal PHD for scientific research (1811/8004, 22.63%). Age, education level, and occupation of the participants, in addition to the level of digitalization in their country were found to be associated with data sharing attitudes. Conclusions: Positive attitudes toward data sharing for scientific research can be perceived as an indication of trust established between users and academia. Nevertheless, the interpretation of data sharing attitudes is a complex process, related to and influenced by various factors

Usabilidad de las Historias Personales de Salud: métodos de evaluación

This paper presents a study about standards and methods to measure and evaluate usability on Personal Health Records (PHR). Some papers which study the usability of PHR and Electronic Health Records (EHR) are showed.Este trabajo presenta un estudio relacionado con los estándares, métodos y las directrices a seguir para medir y evaluar la usabilidad en las Historias Personales de Salud (HPS). Además, se revisan algunos trabajos que estudian la usabilidad de HPS e Historias Clínicas Electrónicas (HCE)