Publications by authors named "Rosa Maimone"

The onset of cancer disease is a traumatic experience for both patients and their families that suddenly change the patient's life and is accompanied by important physical, emotional, and psycho-social problems. The complexity of this scenario has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic which dramatically affected the continuity of the provision of optimal care to chronic patients. Telemedicine can support the management of oncology care paths by furnishing a suite of effective and efficient tools to monitor the therapies of cancer patients.

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The aim of the "Smuovi La Salute" ("Shake Your Health") project was to implement an integrated and comprehensive model to prevent and treat overweight and obesity in low socioeconomic status (SES) and minority groups living in three different districts in the north of Italy. An app and a cookbook promoting transcultural nutrition and a healthy lifestyle were developed, and no-cost physical activities were organized. Healthy lifestyle teaching was implemented in 30 primary school classrooms.

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Background: University students are increasingly reporting common mental health problems, such as stress, anxiety, and depression, and they frequently face barriers to seeking psychological support because of stigma, cost, and availability of mental health services. This issue is even more critical in the challenging time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital mental health interventions, such as those delivered via chatbots on mobile devices, offer the potential to achieve scalability of healthy-coping interventions by lowering cost and supporting prevention.

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Background: Italy was the first country to largely experience the COVID-19 epidemic among other Western countries during the so-called first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Proper management of an increasing number of home-quarantined individuals created a significant challenge for health care authorities and professionals. This was especially true when considering the importance of remote surveillance to detect signs of disease progression and consequently regulate access to hospitals and intensive care units on a priority basis.

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Health coaching can be an effective intervention to support self-management of chronic conditions like diabetes, but there are not enough coaching practitioners to reach the growing population in need of support. Conversational technology, like chatbots, presents an opportunity to extend health coaching support to broader and more diverse populations. However, some have suggested that the human element is essential to health coaching and cannot be replicated with technology.

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Automatically monitoring and supporting healthy lifestyle is a recent research trend, fostered by the availability of low-cost monitoring devices, and it can significantly contribute to the prevention of chronic diseases deriving from incorrect diet and lack of physical activity. In this paper, we present a general purpose architecture for persuasion scenarios and behavioral change. The architecture is designed to be easily portable across languages and domains and has been implemented and evaluated in a specific system for Workplace Health Promotion (WHP) called PerKApp.

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Background: Nutrition and diet apps represent today a popular area of mobile health (mHealth), offering the possibility of delivering behavior change (BC) interventions for healthy eating and weight management in a scalable and cost-effective way. However, if commercial apps for pediatric weight management fail to retain users because of a lack of theoretical background and evidence-based content, mHealth apps that are more evidence-based are found less engaging and popular among consumers. Approaching the apps development process from a multidisciplinary and user-centered design (UCD) perspective is likely to help overcome these limitations, raising the chances for an easier adoption and integration of nutrition education apps within primary care interventions.

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Prolonged exposure to stressful environments can lead to serious health problems. Therefore, measuring stress in daily life situations through non-invasive procedures has become a significant research challenge. In this paper, we describe a system for the automatic detection of momentary stress from behavioral and physiological measures collected through wearable sensors.

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