An analysis of physical activity coping plans: mapping barriers and coping strategies based on user ratings.

Introduction: Personalising recommendations for physical activity coping plans can help bridging the physical activity intention-behaviour gap. Data-driven 'black-box' approaches result in recommendations that prove difficult to explain, and may have undesired consequences. This study aimed to explicitly link barriers and coping strategies using end-user input.

Fitbit's accuracy to measure short bouts of stepping and sedentary behaviour: validation, sensitivity and specificity study.

Objective: This study aims to assess the suitability of Fitbit devices for real-time physical activity (PA) and sedentary behaviour (SB) monitoring in the context of just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) and event-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies.

Methods: Thirty-seven adults (18-65 years) and 32 older adults (65+) from Belgium and the Czech Republic wore four devices simultaneously for 3 days: two Fitbit models on the wrist, an ActiGraph GT3X+ at the hip and an ActivPAL at the thigh. Accuracy measures included mean (absolute) error and mean (absolute) percentage error.

Identifying app components that promote physical activity: a group concept mapping study.

Background: Digital interventions are a promising avenue to promote physical activity in healthy adults. Current practices recommend to include end-users early on in the development process. This study focuses on the wishes and needs of users regarding an a mobile health (mHealth) application that promotes physical activity in healthy adults, and on the differences between participants who do or do not meet the World Health Organization's recommendation of an equivalent of 150 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity.

Within-Person Associations of Accelerometer-Assessed Physical Activity With Time-Varying Determinants in Older Adults: Time-Based Ecological Momentary Assessment Study.

Background: Despite the availability of physical activity (PA) interventions, many older adults are still not active enough. This might be partially explained by the often-limited effects of PA interventions. In general, health behavior change interventions often do not focus on contextual and time-varying determinants, which may limit their effectiveness.

Content and quality of physical activity ontologies: a systematic review.

Introduction: Ontologies are a formal way to represent knowledge in a particular field and have the potential to transform the field of health promotion and digital interventions. However, few researchers in physical activity (PA) are familiar with ontologies, and the field can be difficult to navigate. This systematic review aims to (1) identify ontologies in the field of PA, (2) assess their content and (3) assess their quality.

A Software Engineering Framework for Reusable Design of Personalized Serious Games for Health: Development Study.

Background: The use of serious games in health care is on the rise, as these games motivate treatment adherence, reduce treatment costs, and educate patients and families. However, current serious games fail to offer personalized interventions, ignoring the need to abandon the one-size-fits-all approach. Moreover, these games, with a primary objective other than pure entertainment, are costly and complex to develop and require the constant involvement of a multidisciplinary team.

Towards more personalized digital health interventions: a clustering method of action and coping plans to promote physical activity.

Background: Despite effectiveness of action and coping planning in digital health interventions to promote physical activity (PA), attrition rates remain high. Indeed, support to make plans is often abstract and similar for each individual. Nevertheless, people are different, and context varies.

An adaptation algorithm for personalised virtual reality exposure therapy.

Background: Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent in mental health problems. The lives of people suffering from an anxiety disorder can be severely impaired. Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) is an effective treatment, which immerses patients in a controlled Virtual Environment (VE).

Overly optimistic prediction results on imbalanced data: a case study of flaws and benefits when applying over-sampling.

Information extracted from electrohysterography recordings could potentially prove to be an interesting additional source of information to estimate the risk on preterm birth. Recently, a large number of studies have reported near-perfect results to distinguish between recordings of patients that will deliver term or preterm using a public resource, called the Term/Preterm Electrohysterogram database. However, we argue that these results are overly optimistic due to a methodological flaw being made.

Clinical information extraction for preterm birth risk prediction.

This paper contributes to the pursuit of leveraging unstructured medical notes to structured clinical decision making. In particular, we present a pipeline for clinical information extraction from medical notes related to preterm birth, and discuss the main challenges as well as its potential for clinical practice. A large collection of medical notes, created by staff during hospitalizations of patients who were at risk of delivering preterm, was gathered and analyzed.

Empowering Children with ASD and Their Parents: Design of a Serious Game for Anxiety and Stress Reduction.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by social interaction difficulties and communication difficulties. Moreover, children with ASD often suffer from other co-morbidities, such as anxiety and depression. Finding appropriate treatment can be difficult as symptoms of ASD and co-morbidities often overlap.

A decision support system to follow up and diagnose primary headache patients using semantically enriched data.

Background: Headache disorders are an important health burden, having a large health-economic impact worldwide. Current treatment & follow-up processes are often archaic, creating opportunities for computer-aided and decision support systems to increase their efficiency. Existing systems are mostly completely data-driven, and the underlying models are a black-box, deteriorating interpretability and transparency, which are key factors in order to be deployed in a clinical setting.

The OCarePlatform: A context-aware system to support independent living.

Background: Currently, healthcare services, such as institutional care facilities, are burdened with an increasing number of elderly people and individuals with chronic illnesses and a decreasing number of competent caregivers.

Objectives: To relieve the burden on healthcare services, independent living at home could be facilitated, by offering individuals and their (in)formal caregivers support in their daily care and needs. With the rise of pervasive healthcare, new information technology solutions can assist elderly people ("residents") and their caregivers to allow residents to live independently for as long as possible.

Sharing health data in Belgium: A home care case study using the Vitalink platform.

In 2013, the Flemish Government launched the Vitalink platform. This initiative focuses on the sharing of health and welfare data to support primary healthcare. In this paper, the objectives and mission of the Vitalink initiative are discussed.

Social-aware Event Handling within the FallRisk Project.

Objectives: With the uprise of the Internet of Things, wearables and smartphones are moving to the foreground. Ambient Assisted Living solutions are, for example, created to facilitate ageing in place. One example of such systems are fall detection systems.

Intelligent task management platform for health care workers.

The medical staff in a hospital could benefit from a specialized task management system, considering their high workload covering different patients. This article presents an intelligent task management platform that automatically prioritizes and (re-)assigns tasks to the appropriate caregivers based on the current health care context captured in a continuous care ontology. Moreover, this platform provides the caregivers with a smartphone allowing them to easily view and process their assigned tasks.

Towards a social and context-aware multi-sensor fall detection and risk assessment platform.

For elderly people fall incidents are life-changing events that lead to degradation or even loss of autonomy. Current fall detection systems are not integrated and often associated with undetected falls and/or false alarms. In this paper, a social- and context-aware multi-sensor platform is presented, which integrates information gathered by a plethora of fall detection systems and sensors at the home of the elderly, by using a cloud-based solution, making use of an ontology.

The OCareCloudS project: Toward organizing care through trusted cloud services.

The increasing elderly population and the shift from acute to chronic illness makes it difficult to care for people in hospitals and rest homes. Moreover, elderly people, if given a choice, want to stay at home as long as possible. In this article, the methodologies to develop a cloud-based semantic system, offering valuable information and knowledge-based services, are presented.

Platform for efficient switching between multiple devices in the intensive care unit.

Introduction: This article is part of the Focus Theme of METHODS of Information in Medicine on "Managing Interoperability and Complexity in Health Systems".

Objectives: Handheld computers, such as tablets and smartphones, are becoming more and more accessible in the clinical care setting and in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). By making the most useful and appropriate data available on multiple devices and facilitate the switching between those devices, staff members can efficiently integrate them in their workflow, allowing for faster and more accurate decisions.

NEOREG: design and implementation of an online Neonatal Registration System to access, follow and analyse the data of newborns with congenital cytomegalovirus infection.

Today's registration of newborns with congenital cytomegalovirus (cCMV) infection is still performed on paper-based forms in Flanders, Belgium. This process has a large administrative impact. It is important that all screening tests are registered to have a complete idea of the impact of cCMV.

Towards automated generation and execution of clinical guidelines: engine design and implementation through the ICU Modified Schofield use case.

As the complexity and amount of medical information keeps increasing, it is difficult to maintain the same quality of care. Therefore, clinical guidelines are used to structure best practices and care, but they also support physicians and nurses in the diagnostic and treatment process. Currently, no standardized format exists to represent these guidelines.

Towards computerizing intensive care sedation guidelines: design of a rule-based architecture for automated execution of clinical guidelines.

Background: Computerized ICUs rely on software services to convey the medical condition of their patients as well as assisting the staff in taking treatment decisions. Such services are useful for following clinical guidelines quickly and accurately. However, the development of services is often time-consuming and error-prone.