A Web-Based Application for Personalized Ecological Momentary Assessment in Psychiatric Care: User-Centered Development of the PETRA Application.

Background: Smartphone self-monitoring of mood, symptoms, and contextual factors through ecological momentary assessment (EMA) provides insights into the daily lives of people undergoing psychiatric treatment. Therefore, EMA has the potential to improve their care. To integrate EMA into treatment, a clinical tool that helps clients and clinicians create personalized EMA diaries and interpret the gathered data is needed.

Resilience in sports: a multidisciplinary, dynamic, and personalized perspective.

Athletes are exposed to various psychological and physiological stressors, such as losing matches and high training loads. Understanding and improving the resilience of athletes is therefore crucial to prevent performance decrements and psychological or physical problems. In this review, resilience is conceptualized as a dynamic process of bouncing back to normal functioning following stressors.

ACTman: Automated preprocessing and analysis of actigraphy data.

Objectives: To introduce a novel software-library called Actigraphy Manager (ACTman) which automates labor-intensive actigraphy data preprocessing and analyses steps while improving transparency, reproducibility, and scalability over software suites traditionally used in actigraphy research practice.

Design: Descriptive.

Methods: Use cases are described for performing a common actigraphy task in ACTman and alternative actigraphy software.

The u-can-act Platform: A Tool to Study Intra-individual Processes of Early School Leaving and Its Prevention Using Multiple Informants.

We present the u-can-act platform, a tool that we developed to study the individual processes of early school leaving and the preventative actions that mentors take to steer these processes in the right direction. Early school leaving is a significant problem, particularly in vocational education, and can have severe consequences for both the individual and society. However, the prevention of early school leaving is hampered by a mismatch between research and practice: research tends to focus on identifying risk factors using group averages and cross-sectional studies, while practitioners focus on intervening in individual processes.

Acute stress responses after indirect exposure to the MH17 airplane crash.

People can experience disasters vicariously (indirectly) via conversation, social media, radio, and television, even when not directly involved in a disaster. This study examined whether vicarious exposure to the MH17-airplane crash in Ukraine, with 196 Dutch victims, elicited affective and somatic responses in Dutch adults about 2,600 km away, who happened to participate in an ongoing diary study. Participants (n = 141) filled out a diary three times a day for 30 days on their smartphones.

Temporal Dynamics of Health and Well-Being: A Crowdsourcing Approach to Momentary Assessments and Automated Generation of Personalized Feedback.

Objective: Recent developments in research and mobile health enable a quantitative idiographic approach in health research. The present study investigates the potential of an electronic diary crowdsourcing study in the Netherlands for (1) large-scale automated self-assessment for individual-based health promotion and (2) enabling research at both the between-persons and within-persons level. To illustrate the latter, we examined between-persons and within-persons associations between somatic symptoms and quality of life.

HowNutsAreTheDutch (HoeGekIsNL): A crowdsourcing study of mental symptoms and strengths.

HowNutsAreTheDutch (Dutch: HoeGekIsNL) is a national crowdsourcing study designed to investigate multiple continuous mental health dimensions in a sample from the general population (n = 12,503). Its main objective is to create an empirically based representation of mental strengths and vulnerabilities, accounting for (i) dimensionality and heterogeneity, (ii) interactivity between symptoms and strengths, and (iii) intra-individual variability. To do so, HowNutsAreTheDutch (HND) makes use of an internet platform that allows participants to (a) compare themselves to other participants via cross-sectional questionnaires and (b) to monitor themselves three times a day for 30 days with an intensive longitudinal diary study via their smartphone.

Ecological Momentary Assessments and Automated Time Series Analysis to Promote Tailored Health Care: A Proof-of-Principle Study.

Background: Health promotion can be tailored by combining ecological momentary assessments (EMA) with time series analysis. This combined method allows for studying the temporal order of dynamic relationships among variables, which may provide concrete indications for intervention. However, application of this method in health care practice is hampered because analyses are conducted manually and advanced statistical expertise is required.

Automating Vector Autoregression on Electronic Patient Diary Data.

Finding the best vector autoregression model for any dataset, medical or otherwise, is a process that, to this day, is frequently performed manually in an iterative manner requiring a statistical expertize and time. Very few software solutions for automating this process exist, and they still require statistical expertize to operate. We propose a new application called Autovar, for the automation of finding vector autoregression models for time series data.

E-mental health self-management for psychotic disorders: state of the art and future perspectives.

Objective: The aim of this review was to investigate to what extent information technology may support self-management among service users with psychotic disorders. The investigation aimed to answer the following questions: What types of e-mental health self-management interventions have been developed and evaluated? What is the current evidence on clinical outcome and cost-effectiveness of the identified interventions? To what extent are e-mental health self-management interventions oriented toward the service user?

Methods: A systematic review of references through July 2012 derived from MEDLINE, PsycINFO, AMED, CINAHL, and the Library, Information Science and Technology database was performed. Studies of e-mental health self-management interventions for persons with psychotic disorders were selected independently by three reviewers.

A web-based tool to support shared decision making for people with a psychotic disorder: randomized controlled trial and process evaluation.

Background: Mental health policy makers encourage the development of electronic decision aids to increase patient participation in medical decision making. Evidence is needed to determine whether these decision aids are helpful in clinical practice and whether they lead to increased patient involvement and better outcomes.

Objective: This study reports the outcome of a randomized controlled trial and process evaluation of a Web-based intervention to facilitate shared decision making for people with psychotic disorders.

Generating personalized advice for schizophrenia patients.

Unlabelled: The results of routine patient assessments in psychiatric healthcare in the Northern Netherlands are primarily used to support clinicians. We developed Wegweis, a web-based advice platform, to make this data accessible and understandable for patients.

Objective: We show that a fully automated explanation and interpretation of assessment results for schizophrenia patients, which prioritizes the information in the same way that a clinician would, is possible and is considered helpful and relevant by patients.

Usability evaluation of a web-based support system for people with a schizophrenia diagnosis.

Background: Routine Outcome Monitoring (ROM) is a systematic way of assessing service users' health conditions for the purpose of better aiding their care. ROM consists of various measures used to assess a service user's physical, psychological, and social condition. While ROM is becoming increasingly important in the mental health care sector, one of its weaknesses is that ROM is not always sufficiently service user-oriented.