During the last decade, the living lab and co-creation concepts have started being blended with the Responsible Research and Innovation approach, aiming to evaluate potential societal anticipations ...toward fostering an inclusive RRI behavior. Teaching co-creation concept and living lab methodologies to university students has started been considered as valuable for future researchers along with the demand of companies and public sectors which turn toward user-center techniques for inspiration to develop innovative and services. To this end, the scientific publications presenting work on teaching co-creation and living lab methodologies are not so many while there are no published research studies on experiential learning activities for teaching co-creation and living lab approaches to university students. This study presents a course based on living labs and co-creation methodologies through experiential learning activities, consisted of four different lectures and an open event. The study involves stakeholders from the academia, the citizens, and the public sector. The results show that lectures with the participation of end-users were the most enjoyable. Furthermore, students thought that they learned the most when they first met the end-users. This lecture was perceived as a successful way to gain methodical knowledge for user-centered design and software development.
Purpose
This study is to evaluate healthcare needs, preferences, and expectations in supportive cancer care as perceived by cancer survivors, family caregivers, and healthcare professionals.
Methods
...Key stakeholders consisted of cancer survivors diagnosed with breast cancer, prostate cancer, or melanoma; adult family caregivers; and healthcare professionals involved in oncology. Recruitment was via several routes, and data were collected via either online surveys or telephone interviews in Greece, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. Framework analysis was applied to the dataset.
Results
One hundred and fifty-five stakeholders participated: 70 cancer survivors, 23 family caregivers, and 62 healthcare professionals (13 clinical roles). Cancer survivors and family caregivers’ needs included information and support on practical/daily living, as frustration was apparent with the lack of follow-up services. Healthcare professionals agreed on a multidisciplinary health service with a “focus on the patient” and availability closer to home. Most healthcare professionals acknowledged that patient-reported outcomes may provide “better individualised care”. Cancer survivors and family caregivers generally felt that the digital platform would be useful for timely personalised support and aided communication. Healthcare professionals were supportive of the “proactive” functionality of the platform and the expected advantages. Anticipated challenges were integration obstacles such as workload/infrastructure and training/support in using the new technology.
Conclusions
Obtaining key stakeholders’ insights provided a foundation for action to further co-create the LifeChamps digital platform to meet needs and priorities and deliver enhanced supportive care to “older” cancer survivors.
Implications for cancer survivors
Co-creation provided insight into gaps where digital support may enhance health and well-being.
•Details of the protocol established to assess the user experience and adherence with a smoking cessation app.•Adaptation of a heuristic for the analysis of mHealth games playability.•Identification ...of improvements for greater adherence in mHealth apps.
Mobile apps have a great potential to support patients in healthcare, and to encourage healthy behavioral changes such as smoking cessation. Nevertheless, the user rejection levels are still high. A set of factors that has impact on the app effectiveness is related to the quality of those features that lead to positive user experiences when using the app. This work aims to evaluate the user experience, and more specifically the usability and the user satisfaction with a mobile application for smoking cessation. This will also provide a basis for future improvements.
We provided a smoking cessation mobile Android app to two different user cohorts, the smokers as valid users and the experts, for three weeks. The app featured usual functionalities to help quit smoking, including an achieved benefits section, mini-games to distract during cravings, and supportive motivational messages. We collected information about user experience, through game playability and message satisfaction questionnaires, and the experts’ opinions. We also considered usage of app sections, the duration of the mini-game sessions, and the user ratings for motivational messages.
We included 45 valid users and 25 experts in this study. The questionnaire indicated 80% satisfaction rate for the motivational messages. According to game questionnaires, over 69% of the participants agreed that the games have good usability features, however, for questions related to mobility and gameplay heuristics, agreements were below 67%. The most accessed app sections were achieved benefits and the one with motivational messages. The experts described issues that could help to improve the application.
The combination of questionnaires with expert reports allowed to identify several problems and possible corrections. Our study showed that motivational messages have a good satisfaction rate, although it is necessary to consider technical features of some mobile devices that may hinder message reception. Games have good usability and it's expected that the addition of difficulty levels and a better accessibility to the game menu could make them more attractive and increase its usage. Future development of mHealth apps based on gamification and motivational messages need to consider these factors for better user satisfaction and usability.
Advances in neural interfaces have demonstrated remarkable results in the direction of replacing and restoring lost sensorimotor function in human patients. Noninvasive brain-computer interfaces ...(BCIs) are popular due to considerable advantages including simplicity, safety, and low cost, while recent advances aim at improving past technological and neurophysiological limitations. Taking into account the neurophysiological alterations of disabled individuals, investigating brain connectivity features for implementation of BCI control holds special importance. Off-the-shelf BCI systems are based on fast, reproducible detection of mental activity and can be implemented in neurorobotic applications. Moreover, social Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is increasingly important in rehabilitation robotics development. In this paper, we present our progress and goals towards developing off-the-shelf BCI-controlled anthropomorphic robotic arms for assistive technologies and rehabilitation applications. We account for robotics development, BCI implementation, and qualitative assessment of HRI characteristics of the system. Furthermore, we present two illustrative experimental applications of the BCI-controlled arms, a study of motor imagery modalities on healthy individuals’ BCI performance, and a pilot investigation on spinal cord injured patients’ BCI control and brain connectivity. We discuss strengths and limitations of our design and propose further steps on development and neurophysiological study, including implementation of connectivity features as BCI modality.
The global population is aging in an unprecedented manner and the challenges for improving the lives of older adults are currently both a strong priority in the political and healthcare arena. In ...this sense, preventive measures and telemedicine have the potential to play an important role in improving the number of healthy years older adults may experience and virtual coaching is a promising research area to support this process. This paper presents COLAEVA, an interactive web application for older adult population clustering and evolution analysis. Its objective is to support caregivers in the design, validation and refinement of coaching plans adapted to specific population groups. COLAEVA enables coaching caregivers to interactively group similar older adults based on preliminary assessment data, using AI features, and to evaluate the influence of coaching plans once the final assessment is carried out for a baseline comparison. To evaluate COLAEVA, a usability test was carried out with 9 test participants obtaining an average SUS score of 71.1. Moreover, COLAEVA is available online to use and explore.
Synthetic data is an emerging approach for addressing legal and regulatory concerns in biomedical research that deals with personal and clinical data, whether as a single tool or through its ...combination with other privacy enhancing technologies. Generating uncompromised synthetic data could significantly benefit external researchers performing secondary analyses by providing unlimited access to information while fulfilling pertinent regulations. However, the original data to be synthesized (e.g., data acquired in Living Labs) may consist of subjects' metadata (static) and a longitudinal component (set of time-dependent measurements), making it challenging to produce coherent synthetic counterparts.
Three synthetic time series generation approaches were defined and compared in this work: only generating the metadata and coupling it with the real time series from the original data (A1), generating both metadata and time series separately to join them afterwards (A2), and jointly generating both metadata and time series (A3). The comparative assessment of the three approaches was carried out using two different synthetic data generation models: the Wasserstein GAN with Gradient Penalty (WGAN-GP) and the DöppelGANger (DGAN). The experiments were performed with three different healthcare-related longitudinal datasets: Treadmill Maximal Effort Test (TMET) measurements from the University of Malaga (1), a hypotension subset derived from the MIMIC-III v1.4 database (2), and a lifelogging dataset named PMData (3).
Three pivotal dimensions were assessed on the generated synthetic data: resemblance to the original data (1), utility (2), and privacy level (3). The optimal approach fluctuates based on the assessed dimension and metric.
The initial characteristics of the datasets to be synthesized play a crucial role in determining the best approach. Coupling synthetic metadata with real time series (A1), as well as jointly generating synthetic time series and metadata (A3), are both competitive methods, while separately generating time series and metadata (A2) appears to perform more poorly overall.
Smoking is one of the most avoidable health risk factors, and yet the quitting success rates are low. The usage of tailored health messages to support quitting has been proved to increase quitting ...success rates. Technology can provide convenient means to deliver tailored health messages. Health recommender systems are information-filtering algorithms that can choose the most relevant health-related items-for instance, motivational messages aimed at smoking cessation-for each user based on his or her profile. The goals of this study are to analyze the perceived quality of an mHealth recommender system aimed at smoking cessation, and to assess the level of engagement with the messages delivered to users via this medium.
Patients participating in a smoking cessation program will be provided with a mobile app to receive tailored motivational health messages selected by a health recommender system, based on their profile retrieved from an electronic health record as the initial knowledge source. Patients' feedback on the messages and their interactions with the app will be analyzed and evaluated following an observational prospective methodology to a) assess the perceived quality of the mobile-based health recommender system and the messages, using the precision and time-to-read metrics and an 18-item questionnaire delivered to all patients who complete the program, and b) measure patient engagement with the mobile-based health recommender system using aggregated data analytic metrics like session frequency and, to determine the individual-level engagement, the rate of read messages for each user. This paper details the implementation and evaluation protocol that will be followed.
This study will explore whether a health recommender system algorithm integrated with an electronic health record can predict which tailored motivational health messages patients would prefer and consider to be of a good quality, encouraging them to engage with the system. The outcomes of this study will help future researchers design better tailored motivational message-sending recommender systems for smoking cessation to increase patient engagement, reduce attrition, and, as a result, increase the rates of smoking cessation.
The trial was registered at clinicaltrials.org under the ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT03206619 on July 2nd 2017. Retrospectively registered.
Medical education escape rooms are emerging as a viable technological resource for pedagogy-first, learner-centric educational activities. This work presents the evaluation results of the first ...flipped classroom implementation in medical education, thus utilizing a mobile-driven augmented reality (AR) escape room. A total of 21 first-year medical students attended a flipped classroom educational activity that aimed to acclimate the students with the workflows of basic life support. Knowledge acquisition and user perceptions were evaluated. Knowledge acquisition was evaluated with an ad hoc relevant instrument at three timepoints: (a) baseline at recruitment, (b) preclass after students had prepared for the episode, and (c) after class. Learner perceptions about the activity and the AR escape room were recorded at the activity’s end using a previously designed evaluation instrument. The results demonstrated sufficient knowledge acquisition only after completing the whole educational activity, while learners found the experience interesting, and the AR escape room challenging, thus reflecting an activity that was well formulated in structure and content. The challenges identified were the limited out of class collaboration capacity of the digital application and the highly gamified approach that at points counteracted the educational scope of the activity. Overall, these positive initial results demonstrate the potential of collaborative, escape based, activities for self-directed, learner-centric medical education.
Summary
We investigated the alterations of sleep regulation and promotion biomarkers as adenosine through its enzymes total adenosine deaminase (tADA)/adenosine deaminase (ADA2) in a microgravity ...analogue environment of head‐down‐tilt bed rest and their association with brain connectivity networks during non‐rapid eye movement sleep stage 3 (NREM3), as well as the effectiveness of the reactive sledge (RSL) jump countermeasure to promote sleep. A total of 23 healthy male volunteers were maintained in 6° head‐down‐tilt position for 30 days and assigned either to a control or to a RSL group. Blood collection and polysomnographic recordings were performed on data acquisition day 1, 14, 30 and −14, 21, respectively. Immunochemical techniques and network‐based statistics were employed for adenosine enzymes and cortical connectivity estimation. Our findings indicate that human blood adenosine biomarkers as well as NREM3 cortical functional connectivity are impaired in simulated microgravity. RSL physical activity intervened in sleep quality via tADA/ADA2 fluctuations lack, minor cortical connectivity increases, and limited degree of node and resting‐state networks. Statistically significant decreases in adenosine biomarkers and NREM3 functional connectivity involving regions (left superior temporal gyrus, right postcentral gyrus, precuneus, left middle frontal gyrus, left postcentral gyrus, left angular gyrus and precuneus) of the auditory, sensorimotor default‐mode and executive networks highlight the sleep disturbances due to simulated microgravity and the sleep‐promoting role of RSL countermeasure. The head‐down‐tilt environment led to sleep deterioration projected through NREM3 cortical brain connectivity or/and adenosine biomarkers shift. This decline was more pronounced in the absence of the RSL countermeasure, thereby highlighting its likely exploitation during space missions.
Reciprocal communication of the central and peripheral nervous systems is compromised during spinal cord injury due to neurotrauma of ascending and descending pathways. Changes in brain organization ...after spinal cord injury have been associated with differences in prognosis. Changes in functional connectivity may also serve as injury biomarkers. Most studies on functional connectivity have focused on chronic complete injury or resting-state condition. In our study, ten right-handed patients with incomplete spinal cord injury and ten age- and gender-matched healthy controls performed multiple visual motor imagery tasks of upper extremities and walking under high-resolution electroencephalography recording. Directed transfer function was used to study connectivity at the cortical source space between sensorimotor nodes. Chronic disruption of reciprocal communication in incomplete injury could result in permanent significant decrease of connectivity in a subset of the sensorimotor network, regardless of positive or negative neurological outcome. Cingulate motor areas consistently contributed the larger outflow (right) and received the higher inflow (left) among all nodes, across all motor imagery categories, in both groups. Injured subjects had higher outflow from left cingulate than healthy subjects and higher inflow in right cingulate than healthy subjects. Alpha networks were less dense, showing less integration and more segregation than beta networks. Spinal cord injury patients showed signs of increased local processing as adaptive mechanism. This trial is registered with NCT02443558.
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