Neuropsychol Dev Cogn B Aging Neuropsychol Cogn
November 2024
Rumination (self-referential and repetitive thinking), attentional biases (AB), and impaired cognitive control are theorized as being integral factors in depression and anxiety. Yet, research examining the relationship between rumination, mood, and AB for populations with reduced cognitive control, e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEmbedding sensors into clothing is promising as a way for people to wear multiple sensors easily, for applications such as long-term activity monitoring. To our knowledge, this is the first published dataset collected from sensors in loose clothing. 6 Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) were configured as a 'sensor string' and attached to casual trousers such that there were three sensors on each leg near the waist, thigh, and ankle/lower-shank.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: To measure home-based older adults' attentional biases (AB) using webcam-based eye-tracking (WBET) and examine internal consistency.
Methods: Twelve participants with and without cognitive impairment completed online self-report anxiety and depression screens, and a 96-trial dot-probe task with eye-gaze tracking. For each trial, participants fixated on a cross, free-viewed sad-neutral, sad-angry, sad-happy, angry-neutral, angry-happy, and happy-neutral facial expression pairings, and then fixated on a dot.
Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) are a potential way to monitor the mobility of people outside clinical or laboratory settings at an acceptable cost. To increase accuracy, multiple IMUs can be used. By embedding multiple sensors into everyday clothing, it is possible to simplify having to put on individual sensors, ensuring sensors are correctly located and oriented.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA person's walking pattern can reveal important information about their health. Mounting multiple sensors onto loose clothing potentially offers a comfortable way of collecting data about walking and other human movement. This research investigates how well the data from three sensors mounted on the lateral side of clothing (on a pair of trousers near the waist, upper thigh and lower shank) correlate with the data from sensors mounted on the frontal side of the body.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Evidence suggests that eating behaviors and adherence to dietary guidelines can be improved using nutrition-related apps. Apps delivering personalized nutrition (PN) advice to users can provide individual support at scale with relatively low cost.
Objective: This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of a mobile web app (eNutri) that delivers automated PN advice for improving diet quality, relative to general population food-based dietary guidelines.
Int J Environ Res Public Health
February 2021
Vegetarian diets have gained in popularity, especially among highly educated women, and are considered beneficial to health. Comparative studies assessing the diet of vegetarians against omnivores are rather limited and often provide ambivalent results. Therefore, this study examined the nutrient intake and nutritional quality of vegetarian and omnivorous diets in a group of 61 female students in Germany.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The web-based EatWellQ8 food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) was developed as a dietary assessment tool for healthy adults in Kuwait. Validation against reliable instruments and assessment of its reproducibility are required to ensure the accuracy of the EatWellQ8 FFQ in computing nutrient intake.
Objective: This study aims to assess the reproducibility and relative validity of the EatWellQ8 146-item FFQ, which included images of food portion sizes based on The Composition of Foods by McCance and Widdowson and food composition tables from Kuwait and the Kingdom of Bahrain, against a paper-based FFQ (PFFQ) and a 4-day weighed food record (WFR).
Prevention strategies for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) are a global priority as it has been estimated that NCDs will account for around 73% of worldwide mortality by the year 2020. The adoption of diets that are low in saturated fat, free sugars, and red and processed meats and higher in unsaturated fats, wholegrains, fruit, and vegetables have been shown to reduce the risk of NCDs. With increasing internet use, several nutrition interventions are now being conducted online as well as face-to-face, however it is unclear which delivery method is most effective.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMusic provides a means of communicating affective meaning. However, the neurological mechanisms by which music induces affect are not fully understood. Our project sought to investigate this through a series of experiments into how humans react to affective musical stimuli and how physiological and neurological signals recorded from those participants change in accordance with self-reported changes in affect.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInertial sensors are a useful instrument for long term monitoring in healthcare. In many cases, inertial sensor devices can be worn as an accessory or integrated into smart textiles. In some situations, it may be beneficial to have data from multiple inertial sensors, rather than relying on a single worn sensor, since this may increase the accuracy of the analysis and better tolerate sensor errors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ability of music to evoke activity changes in the core brain structures that underlie the experience of emotion suggests that it has the potential to be used in therapies for emotion disorders. A large volume of research has identified a network of sub-cortical brain regions underlying music-induced emotions. Additionally, separate evidence from electroencephalography (EEG) studies suggests that prefrontal asymmetry in the EEG reflects the approach-withdrawal response to music-induced emotion.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNutrition apps have great potential to support people to improve their diets, but few apps give automated validated personalised nutrition advice. A web app capable of delivering automated personalised food-based nutrition advice (eNutri) was developed. The aims of this study were to i) evaluate and optimise the personalised nutrition report provided by the app and ii) compare the personalised food-based advice with nutrition professionals' standards to aid validation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe internet has considerable potential to improve health-related food choice at low-cost. Online solutions in this field can be deployed quickly and at very low cost, especially if they are not dependent on bespoke devices or offline processes such as the provision and analysis of biological samples. One key challenge is the automated delivery of personalised dietary advice in a replicable, scalable and inexpensive way, using valid nutrition assessment methods and effective recommendations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Hum Neurosci
October 2017
Beat perception is fundamental to how we experience music, and yet the mechanism behind this spontaneous building of the internal beat representation is largely unknown. Existing findings support links between the tempo (speed) of the beat and enhancement of electroencephalogram (EEG) activity at tempo-related frequencies, but there are no studies looking at how tempo may affect the underlying long-range interactions between EEG activity at different electrodes. The present study investigates these long-range interactions using EEG activity recorded from 21 volunteers listening to music stimuli played at 4 different tempi (50, 100, 150 and 200 beats per minute).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Food frequency questionnaires (FFQs) are well established in the nutrition field, but there remain important questions around how to develop online tools in a way that can facilitate wider uptake. Also, FFQ user acceptance and evaluation have not been investigated extensively.
Objective: This paper presents a Web-based graphical food frequency assessment system that addresses challenges of reproducibility, scalability, mobile friendliness, security, and usability and also presents the utilization metrics and user feedback from a deployment study.
Although the roles of verbal short-term and working memory on spoken sentence comprehension skills in persons with aphasia have been debated for many years, the development of treatments to mitigate verbal short-term and working memory deficits as a way of improving spoken sentence comprehension is a new avenue in treatment research. In this article, we review and critically appraise this emerging evidence base. We also present new data from five persons with aphasia of a replication of a previously reported treatment that had resulted in some improvement of spoken sentence comprehension in a person with aphasia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: A key challenge in human nutrition is the assessment of usual food intake. This is of particular interest given recent proposals of eHealth personalized interventions. The adoption of mobile phones has created an opportunity for assessing and improving nutrient intake as they can be used for digitalizing dietary assessments and providing feedback.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPatterns of cognitive change over micro-longitudinal timescales (i.e., ranging from hours to days) are associated with a wide range of age-related health and functional outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: We aim to develop and evaluate an affective brain-computer music interface (aBCMI) for modulating the affective states of its users.
Approach: An aBCMI is constructed to detect a user's current affective state and attempt to modulate it in order to achieve specific objectives (for example, making the user calmer or happier) by playing music which is generated according to a specific affective target by an algorithmic music composition system and a case-based reasoning system. The system is trained and tested in a longitudinal study on a population of eight healthy participants, with each participant returning for multiple sessions.
The "Novel Assessment of Nutrition and Ageing" (NANA) toolkit is a computerized system for collecting longitudinal information about older adults' health and behavior. Here, we describe the validation of six items for measuring older adults' self-reported mood and appetite as part of the NANA system. In Study 1, 48 community-living older adults (aged 65-89 years) completed NANA measures of their current mood and appetite alongside standard paper measures, on three occasions, in a laboratory setting.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt is widely acknowledged that music can communicate and induce a wide range of emotions in the listener. However, music is a highly-complex audio signal composed of a wide range of complex time- and frequency-varying components. Additionally, music-induced emotions are known to differ greatly between listeners.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDietary assessment in older adults can be challenging. The Novel Assessment of Nutrition and Ageing (NANA) method is a touch-screen computer-based food record that enables older adults to record their dietary intakes. The objective of the present study was to assess the relative validity of the NANA method for dietary assessment in older adults.
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