Neural Style Transfer as Data Augmentation for Improving COVID-19 Diagnosis Classification.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has accounted for millions of causalities. While it affects not only individuals but also our collective healthcare and economic systems, testing is insufficient and costly hampering efforts to deal with the pandemic. Chest X-rays are routine radiographic imaging tests that are used for the diagnosis of respiratory conditions such as pneumonia and COVID-19.

Gait Activity Classification on Unbalanced Data from Inertial Sensors Using Shallow and Deep Learning.

Activity recognition is one of the most active areas of research in ubiquitous computing. In particular, gait activity recognition is useful to identify various risk factors in people's health that are directly related to their physical activity. One of the issues in activity recognition, and gait in particular, is that often datasets are unbalanced (i.

Monitoring behavioral symptoms of dementia using activity trackers.

Tertiary disease prevention for dementia focuses on improving the quality of life of the patient. The quality of life of people with dementia (PwD) and their caregivers is hampered by the presence of behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD), such as anxiety and depression. Non-pharmacological interventions have proved useful in dealing with these symptoms.

Semi-Automated Data Labeling for Activity Recognition in Pervasive Healthcare.

Activity recognition, a key component in pervasive healthcare monitoring, relies on classification algorithms that require labeled data of individuals performing the activity of interest to train accurate models. Labeling data can be performed in a lab setting where an individual enacts the activity under controlled conditions. The ubiquity of mobile and wearable sensors allows the collection of large datasets from individuals performing activities in naturalistic conditions.

Incorporating Conversational Strategies in a Social Robot to Interact with People with Dementia.

Background: Socially assistive robots (SARs) have the potential to assist nonpharmacological interventions based on verbal communication to support the care of persons with dementia (PwDs). However, establishing verbal communication with a PwD is challenging. Thus, several authors have proposed strategies to converse with PwDs.

Detecting Anxiety States when Caring for People with Dementia.

Background: Caregiving is a complex, stressful activity, which frequently leads to anxiety and the development of depressive disorders. Recent advances in wearable sensing allows to monitor relevant physiological data of the caregiver for detecting anxiety spans and for enacting coping strategies to reduce their anxiety when needed.

Objectives: This work proposes a method to infer anxiety states of caregivers when caring for people with dementia, by using physiological data.

Assessing empathy and managing emotions through interactions with an affective avatar.

Assistive technologies can improve the quality of life of people diagnosed with different forms of social communication disorders. We report on the design and evaluation of an affective avatar aimed at engaging the user in a social interaction with the purpose of assisting in communication therapies. A human-avatar taxonomy is proposed to assist the design of affective avatars aimed at addressing social communication disorder.

Use and Adoption of an Assisted Cognition System to Support Therapies for People with Dementia.

The cognitive deficits in persons with dementia (PwD) can produce significant functional impairment from early stages. Although memory decline is most prominent, impairments in attention, orientation, language, reasoning, and executive functioning are also common. Dementia is also characterized by changes in personality and behavioral functioning that can be very challenging for caregivers and patients.

Effect of technology on aging perception.

Technology can assist older adults to maintain an active lifestyle. To better understand the effect that technology has on aging perception, we conducted two studies. In the first study, through supraliminal priming, we analyzed the effects of aging- and technology-related stimuli on age estimation.

Naturalistic Enactment to Elicit and Recognize Caregiver State Anxiety.

Caring for people with dementia imposes significant stress on family members and caregivers. Often, these informal caregivers have no coping strategy to deal with these behaviors. Anxiety and stress episodes are often triggered by problematic behaviors exhibited by the person who suffers from dementia.

Using Mixed Methods in Health Information Technology Evaluation.

With the increasing adoption of interactive systems in healthcare, there is a need to ensure that the benefits of such systems are formally evaluated. Traditionally quantitative research approaches have been used to gather evidence on measurable outcomes of health technology. Qualitative approaches have also been used to analyze how or why particular interventions did or did not work in specific healthcare contexts.

Healthcare Engineering Defined: A White Paper.

Engineering has been playing an important role in serving and advancing healthcare. The term "Healthcare Engineering" has been used by professional societies, universities, scientific authors, and the healthcare industry for decades. However, the definition of "Healthcare Engineering" remains ambiguous.

Dashboards for improving patient care: review of the literature.

Aim: This review aimed to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of evidence for the use of clinical and quality dashboards in health care environments.

Methods: A literature search was performed for the dates 1996-2012 on CINAHL, Medline, Embase, Cochrane Library, PsychInfo, Science Direct and ACM Digital Library. A citation search and a hand search of relevant papers were also conducted.

Effects of communication media choice on the quality and efficacy of emergency calls assisted by a mobile nursing protocol tool.

The transition from paper to electronic-based records in the healthcare industry has posed several challenges to conventional medical practices. The introduction of technology in day-to-day medical and nursing practices deserves careful consideration. In this work, we report the results of a controlled experiment to compare nurses' consultation in emergency calls in six different conditions.

Intervention tailoring in augmented cognition systems for elders with dementia.

We present an approach for personalizing nonpharmacological interventions for people with dementia (PwD) using ontologies. We conducted two case studies to derive an ontological model to personalize the planning and execution of interventions to address problematic behaviors. The paper describes how the ontology was derived, and illustrates how it is used to tailor an ambient-assisted intervention system (AAIS) at two stages: first, to decide on the services that the AAIS will offer the PwD, and then to adapt these services at runtime using contextual information.

International priorities for research in nursing informatics for patient care.

The Nursing Informatics International Research Network (NIIRN) is a group of experts who are collaborating on the development of internationally relevant research programs for nursing informatics. In this paper we outline key findings of a survey exploring international research priorities for nursing informatics. The survey was available online during May-August 2012.

Nurse home visits with or without alert buttons versus usual care in the frail elderly: a randomized controlled trial.

Objective: To assess whether an intervention based on nurse home visits including alert buttons (NV+AB) is effective in reducing frailty compared to nurse home visits alone (NV-only) and usual care (control group) for older adults.

Design: Unblinded, randomized, controlled trial.

Setting: Insured population covered by the Mexican Social Security Institute living in the city of Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico.

Understanding and supporting lightweight communication in hospital work.

Informal communication is an essential resource in hospital work; it is used as a means to collaborate and coordinate the way in which work is performed, as well as to locate and gather the artifacts and human resources required for patient care. The need of physical proximity to establish and hold informal communications has motivated the development of tools that support remote informal interaction. However, this kind of technology has not been widely adopted in hospitals, where workers experience intense mobility.

Mobility in hospital work: towards a pervasive computing hospital environment.

Handheld computers are increasingly being used by hospital workers. With the integration of wireless networks into hospital information systems, handheld computers can provide the basis for a pervasive computing hospital environment; to develop this designers need empirical information to understand how hospital workers interact with information while moving around. To characterise the medical phenomena we report the results of a workplace study conducted in a hospital.

Location-aware access to hospital information and services.

Hospital workers are highly mobile; they are constantly changing location to perform their daily work, which includes visiting patients, locating resources, such as medical records, or consulting with other specialists. The information required by these specialists is highly dependent on their location. Access to a patient's laboratory results might be more relevant when the physician is near the patient's bed and not elsewhere.

Integrating context-aware public displays into a mobile hospital information system.

Hospitals are convenient settings for deployment of ubiquitous computing technology. Not only are they technology-rich environments, but their workers experience a high level of mobility resulting in information infrastructures with artifacts distributed throughout the premises. Hospital information systems (HISs) that provide access to electronic patient records are a step in the direction of providing accurate and timely information to hospital staff in support of adequate decision-making.