Publications by authors named "Walter Greenleaf"

Digital health tools are emerging as a promising solution for optimizing Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) therapy for neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's Disease (PD), addressing challenges of therapy maintenance, care access, and discrete assessments. Wearable technology and mobile health platforms can offer remote monitoring capabilities, allowing for real-time virtual programming with optimization of patients' therapy, use of digital biomarkers that can help identify the onset, symptoms, medication-related fluctuations and side-effects, and response to DBS treatment. Through an investigational remote monitoring application (RM app) integrating patient-reported outcomes (PROs) and objective data using wearables, we aimed to develop an accessible, data-driven digital tool to monitor patient symptoms and deliver low-burden and easy-to-access DBS therapy.

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Scientific conferences play an important role in advancing research, scholarship, and the careers of emerging scientists. The COVID-19 pandemic offered meeting organizers and researchers alike an opportunity to reimagine what scientific conferences could look like. Virtual conferences can increase inclusivity and accessibility while decreasing costs and carbon emissions.

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There is an urgent need to improve the clinical management of major depressive disorder (MDD), which has become increasingly prevalent over the past two decades. Several gaps and challenges in the awareness, detection, treatment, and monitoring of MDD remain to be addressed. Digital health technologies have demonstrated utility in relation to various health conditions, including MDD.

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Augmented and virtual reality devices are being actively investigated and implemented for a wide range of medical uses. However, significant gaps in the evaluation of these medical devices and applications hinder their regulatory evaluation. Addressing these gaps is critical to demonstrating the devices' safety and effectiveness.

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Digital health can drive patient-centric innovation in neuromodulation by leveraging current tools to identify response predictors and digital biomarkers. Iterative technological evolution has led us to an ideal point to integrate digital health with neuromodulation. Here, we provide an overview of the digital health building-blocks, the status of advanced neuromodulation technologies, and future applications for neuromodulation with digital health integration.

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Background: Virtual reality (VR) use in health care has increased over the past few decades, with its utility expanding from a teaching tool to a highly reliable neuro-technology adjunct in multiple fields including neurosurgery. Generally, brain tumor surgery with the patient awake has only been performed for mapping of language and motor areas. With the rise of VR and advancing surgical techniques, neurosurgical teams are developing an increased understanding of patients' anatomo-functional connectivity.

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Background: Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) interventions are emerging as promising tools in the treatment of pediatric chronic pain conditions. However, in this young field, there is little consensus to guide the process of engaging in the development and evaluation of targeted VR-based interventions.

Objective: The INOVATE-Pain (Interdisciplinary Network on Virtual and Augmented Technologies for Pain management) consortium aims to advance the field of VR for pediatric chronic pain rehabilitation by providing guidance for best practices in the design, evaluation, and dissemination of VR-based interventions targeting this population.

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Despite strong evidence of effectiveness, exposure therapy is an underutilized treatment for anxiety disorders at a time when effective treatment for anxiety is greatly needed. The significant worldwide prevalence and negative impact of anxiety are documented and highlight the importance of increasing therapist and patient use of effective treatment. Obstacles to the use of exposure therapy are explored and steps to lessen these obstacles are proposed.

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Virtual reality (VR) has been proposed as a methodological tool to study the basic science of psychology and other fields. One key advantage of VR is that sharing of virtual content can lead to more robust replication and representative sampling. A database of standardized content will help fulfill this vision.

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Precision medicine models for personalizing achieving sustained behavior change are largely outside of current clinical practice. Yet, changing self-regulatory behaviors is fundamental to the self-management of complex lifestyle-related chronic conditions such as depression and obesity - two top contributors to the global burden of disease and disability. To optimize treatments and address these burdens, behavior change and self-regulation must be better understood in relation to their neurobiological underpinnings.

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