The effect of robot speed on comfortable passing distances.

Robots navigate ever more often in close proximity to people. In the current work, we focused on two distinctive navigational scenarios: passing and overtaking a person who is walking. In the first experiment, we compared nine different passing distances for a humanoid robot and found that human comfort increased with passing distance and that their relationship could be described by an inverted Gaussian.

Design of a Game-Based Training Environment to Enhance Mental Health Care Professionals' Skills in Using e-Mental Health: Multiple Methods User Requirements Analysis.

Background: A major factor hampering the adoption of technology in mental health care is a lack of knowledge and skills. Serious gaming offers a potentially effective strategy to enhance the skills needed through experiencing and learning-by-doing in a playful way. However, serious gaming solutions are not widely available for mental health care.

The Influence of Personal Health Data on the Health Coaching Process.

Tracking health data, for example, through wearable devices or health apps, is increasingly commonplace. Consequently, health coaches (e.g.

Habit and goal-related constructs in determining toothbrushing behavior: Two sensor-based longitudinal studies.

Objectives: Two longitudinal studies were conducted to examine how habits and goal-related constructs determine toothbrushing behavior from a dual-process perspective. We aimed to describe the variations of habit strength, intention, and attitude and to test their associations with actual behavior at both inter- and intraindividual levels. In addition, toothbrushing behavior was measured both by self-report and sensors with the goal to compare these measures.

Theory-based habit modeling for enhancing behavior prediction in behavior change support systems.

Psychological theories of habit posit that when a strong habit is formed through behavioral repetition, it can trigger behavior automatically in the same environment. Given the reciprocal relationship between habit and behavior, changing lifestyle behaviors is largely a task of breaking old habits and creating new and healthy ones. Thus, representing users' habit strengths can be very useful for behavior change support systems, for example, to predict behavior or to decide when an intervention reaches its intended effect.

Exploring physiologic reactions to persuasive information.

Persuasion aims at changing peoples' motivations and/or behaviors. This study explores how and when physiology reflects persuasion processes and specifically whether individual differences in motivations and behaviors affect psychophysiologic reactions to persuasive information. Participants (N = 70) with medium or high meat consumption patterns watched a persuasive video advocating limited meat consumption, while their electrodermal and cardiovascular physiology was measured.

The Impact of Mindset on Self-Tracking Experience.

Self-tracking technologies aim to offer a better understanding of ourselves through data, create self-awareness, and facilitate healthy behavior change. Despite such promising objectives, very little is known about whether the implicit beliefs users may have about the changeability of their own behavior influence the way they experience self-tracking. These implicit beliefs about the permanence of the abilities are called mindsets; someone with a fixed mindset typically perceives human qualities (e.

Assessing Professionals' Adoption Readiness for eMental Health: Development and Validation of the eMental Health Adoption Readiness Scale.

Background: The last few decades have witnessed significant advances in the development of digital tools and applications for mental health care. Despite growing evidence for their effectiveness, acceptance and use of these tools in clinical practice remain low. Hence, a validated and easy-to-use instrument for assessing professionals' readiness to adopt eMental health (EMH) is necessary to gain further insights into the process of EMH adoption and facilitate future research on this topic.

Correction: Theory Integration for Lifestyle Behavior Change in the Digital Age: An Adaptive Decision-Making Framework.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.2196/17127.].

Theory Integration for Lifestyle Behavior Change in the Digital Age: An Adaptive Decision-Making Framework.

Despite the growing popularity of digital health interventions, limitations of traditional behavior change theories and a lack of theory integration hinder theory-driven behavior change applications. In this paper, we aim to review theories relevant to lifestyle behavior change from the broader psychology literature and then integrate these theories into a new theoretical framework called adaptive decision-making to address two specific problems. First, our framework represents lifestyle behaviors at two levels-one of individual daily decisions (action level) and one of larger behavioral episodes (reflection level)-to more closely match the temporal characteristics of lifestyle behaviors and their associated digital data.

Promoting Occupational Health through Gamification and E-Coaching: A 5-Month User Engagement Study.

Social gamification systems have shown potential for promoting healthy lifestyles, but applying them to occupational settings faces unique design challenges. While occupational settings offer natural communities for social interaction, fairness issues due to heterogeneous personal goals and privacy concerns increase the difficulty of designing engaging games. We explored a two-level game-design, where the first level related to achieving personal goals and the second level was a privacy-protected social competition to maximize goal compliance among colleagues.

Design of a Game-Based Training Environment to Enhance Health Care Professionals' E-Mental Health Skills: Protocol for a User Requirements Analysis.

Background: E-mental health (EMH) offers various possibilities for mental health care delivery, with many studies demonstrating its clinical efficacy. However, the uptake of EMH technologies by mental health care professionals remains to be low. One of the reasons for this is the lack of knowledge and skills in using these technologies.

Promoting Physical Activity With Self-Tracking and Mobile-Based Coaching for Cardiac Surgery Patients During the Discharge-Rehabilitation Gap: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial.

Background: Home-based cardiac rehabilitations (CRs) with digital technologies have been researched and implemented to replace, augment, and complement traditional center-based CR in recent years with considerable success. One problem that technology-enhanced home-based CR can potentially address is the gap between cardiac interventions and formal CR programs. In the Netherlands and some other countries (eg, Australia), patients after cardiac interventions stay at home for 3-4 weeks without much support from their physicians, and often engage in very little physical activity (PA).

Assisting Home-Based Resistance Training for Normotensive and Prehypertensive Individuals Using Ambient Lighting and Sonification Feedback: Sensor-Based System Evaluation.

Background: Physical exercise is an effective lifestyle intervention to improve blood pressure. Although aerobic sports can be performed anywhere, resistance exercises are traditionally performed at the gym; extending the latter to the home setting may promote an increase in the number of practitioners.

Objective: This study aims to evaluate a sensor-based system that guides resistance exercises through ambient lighting and sonification (A/S) feedback in a home setting in 34 study participants who were normotensive and prehypertensive.

Active Involvement of People with Dementia: A Systematic Review of Studies Developing Supportive Technologies.

Although there are promising benefits of supportive technology in dementia care, use of these technologies is still limited. It is challenging for researchers and developers in this field to actively involve people with dementia in development. This review updates and builds on existing knowledge by including a contemporary and relevant perspective.

Breast Cancer Survivors' Experiences With an Activity Tracker Integrated Into a Supervised Exercise Program: Qualitative Study.

Background: There is growing evidence that physical activity is related to a better prognosis after a breast cancer diagnosis, whereas sedentary behavior is associated with worse outcomes. It is therefore important to stimulate physical activity and reduce sedentary time among patients with breast cancer. Activity trackers offer a new opportunity for interventions directed at stimulating physical activity behavior change.

Perceived Drivers and Barriers to the Adoption of eMental Health by Psychologists: The Construction of the Levels of Adoption of eMental Health Model.

Background: The internet offers major opportunities in supporting mental health care, and a variety of technology-mediated mental and behavioral health services have been developed. Yet, despite growing evidence for the effectiveness of these services, their acceptance and use in clinical practice remains low. So far, the current literature still lacks a structured insight into the experienced drivers and barriers to the adoption of electronic mental health (eMental health) from the perspective of clinical psychologists.

Atmosphere in an urban nightlife setting: A case study of the relationship between the socio-physical context and aggressive behavior.

Aggression is strongly influenced by the surrounding socio-physical context, and the development of aggressive behavior is best understood through a continuous cycle of ongoing person-environment interactions. Empirical studies, nevertheless, have been predominantly conducted in the laboratory, studying aggression as a short-lived phenomenon, emerging from and within an individual, and - with situational factors studied in isolation - devoid of its context. The present field study, conducted in an urban nightlife area, complements this research.

In Sync: The Effect of Physiology Feedback on the Match between Heart Rate and Self-Reported Stress.

Over the past years self-tracking of physiological parameters has become increasingly common: more and more people are keeping track of aspects of their physiological state (e.g., heart rate, blood sugar, and blood pressure).

The illusion of nonmediation in telecommunication: voice intensity biases distance judgments to a communication partner.

The illusion of nonmediation is an experience in mediated communication where individuals respond as if the medium is not there. It is frequently associated with advanced media technology, such as virtual environments and teleconference systems. In this paper, we investigate whether people experience an illusion of nonmediation during interactions as simple as making a phone call.

Individual differences in the rubber-hand illusion: predicting self-reports of people's personal experiences.

Can we assess individual differences in the extent to which a person perceives the rubber-hand illusion on the basis of self-reported experiences? In this research, we develop such an instrument using Rasch-type models. In our conception, incorporating an object (e.g.

An exploration of the initial effects of stereoscopic displays on optometric parameters.

Purpose: To compare the effect on optometric variables of reading text presented in 2-D and 3-D on two types of stereoscopic display.

Methods: This study measured changes in binocular visual acuity, fixation disparity, aligning prism, heterophoria, horizontal fusional reserves, prism facility and accommodation responses for near of subjects after completing ten consecutive reading tasks of 1 minute each. The tasks consisted of reading words on a polarized two-view (n = 39) and an auto-stereoscopic lenticular nine-view display (n = 19) with the text presented without or with stereoscopic disparity at 3 m.

The effect of similarities in skin texture and hand shape on perceived ownership of a fake limb.

In the rubber-hand illusion (RHI), people attribute an artificial object to their own body. In the present study, we investigate the extent to which RHI is affected by visual discrepancies between the artificial object and a human hand. We tested Armel and Ramachandran's (2003) hypothesis that people will experience a stronger RHI when the artificial object is a skin-like textured sheet instead of a tabletop.

The form of augmented force-feedback fields and the efficiency and satisfaction in computer-aided pointing tasks.

This study investigates operation efficiency and user satisfaction for spatial and temporal shapes of augmented force-feedback fields to be used with computer pointing devices in target acquisition tasks. In an experiment, three different force-field shapes at two different mean force levels were compared, with an electromechanical force-feedback trackball as control device and with efficiency and user satisfaction as dependent variables. Efficiency was measured by the time required to perform a certain task, and user satisfaction was measured through a subjective rating procedure.