Why developers matter: The case of patient portals.

Existing studies on patient data portals are informative with respect to the patient and physician perspectives, yet relatively little attention has been paid to the role of developers. This case study focuses on how developers view the meaning and purpose of patient portals and how their perspective differs from that of physicians. The findings show that developers and physicians have different views on whether and how the portals can help achieve transparency, efficiency, and patient empowerment.

Physical Activity, Inflammation, and Physical Function in Older Adults: Results From the Health & Retirement Study.

Unlabelled: Physical function declines with aging due to physical and biological changes. The biological process of aging has been associated with increases in systemic inflammation and a greater risk for chronic conditions. In older adults, physical activity aids in maintenance of function.

Size, weight, and expectations.

The size-weight illusion is well-known: if two equally heavy objects differ in size, the large one feels lighter than the small one. Most explanations for this illusion assume that because the information about the relevant attribute (weight itself) is unreliable, information about an irrelevant but correlated attribute (size) is used as well. If such reasoning is correct, one would expect that the illusion can be inverted: if size information is unreliable, weight information will be used to judge size.

Quantifying Quality of Reaching Movements Longitudinally Post-Stroke: A Systematic Review.

Background: Disambiguation of behavioral restitution from compensation is important to better understand recovery of upper limb motor control post-stroke and subsequently design better interventions. Measuring quality of movement (QoM) during standardized performance assays and functional tasks using kinematic and kinetic metrics potentially allows for this disambiguation.

Objectives: To identify longitudinal studies that used kinematic and/or kinetic metrics to investigate post-stroke recovery of reaching and assess whether these studies distinguish behavioral restitution from compensation.

Practice Variation Research in Degenerative Lumbar Disc Surgery: A Literature Review on Design Characteristics and Outcomes.

Study Design: Literature review.

Objective: To describe whether practice variation studies on surgery in patients with lumbar degenerative disc disease used adequate study methodology to identify unwarranted variation, and to inform quality improvement in clinical practice. Secondary aim was to describe whether variation changed over time.

Gravity Influences How We Expect a Cursor to Move.

We expect a cursor to move upwards when we push our computer mouse away. Do we expect it to move upwards on the screen, upwards with respect to our body, or upwards with respect to gravity? To find out, we asked participants to perform a simple task that involved guiding a cursor with a mouse. It took participants that were sitting upright longer to reach targets with the cursor if the screen was tilted, so not only directions on the screen are relevant.

How do Positive Deviants Overcome Health-Related Stigma? An Exploration of Development of Positive Deviance Among People With Stigmatized Health Conditions in Indonesia.

A constructivist grounded theory approach was used to understand how some people living with stigmatized health conditions develop positive deviance to overcome stigma. We examined interviews from 13 identified positive deviants living with four different stigmatized health conditions (HIV, leprosy, schizophrenia, and diabetes) in Indonesia. Positive deviance develops in the form of psychological empowerment through improvement of self-belief and perception (intrapersonal component), development of understanding and skill to exert control in life (interactional component), and self-discovery of successful behaviors and strategies to avert stigma (behavioral component).

Further Evidence That People Rely on Egocentric Information to Guide a Cursor to a Visible Target.

Everyday movements are guided by objects' positions relative to other items in the scene (allocentric information) as well as by objects' positions relative to oneself (egocentric information). Allocentric information can guide movements to the remembered positions of hidden objects, but is it also used when the object remains visible? To stimulate the use of allocentric information, the of the participant's finger controlled the of a cursor that they used to intercept moving targets, so there was no one-to-one mapping between egocentric positions of the hand and cursor. We evaluated whether participants relied on allocentric information by shifting all task-relevant items simultaneously leaving their allocentric relationships unchanged.

Helmholtz Versus Haute Couture: How Horizontal Stripes and Dark Clothes Make You Look Thinner.

In Helmholtz's illusion, a square with horizontal stripes appears taller than an identical square with vertical stripes. This effect has also been observed in experiments with human stimuli, where a human figure wearing a dress with horizontal stripes appears thinner than a drawing clad in vertical stripes. These findings do not agree with the common belief that clothes with horizontal stripes make someone appear wider, neither do they disentangle whether the horizontal or vertical stripes account for the thinning effect.

Harsh Parenting and Child Brain Morphology: A Population-Based Study.

Evidence suggests that maltreatment shapes the child's brain. Little is known, however, about how normal variation in parenting influences the child neurodevelopment. We examined whether harsh parenting is associated with the brain morphology in 2,410 children from a population-based cohort.

Physical Exercise Interventions Targeting Cognitive Functioning and the Cognitive Domains in Nondementia Samples: A Systematic Review of Meta-Analyses.

Objective: We investigated whether physical exercise interventions improve cognitive functioning in nondementia populations.

Methods: We conducted a systematic review of meta-analyses including only randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Two reviewers completed a systematic search of PubMed, Embase, PsychInfo, and Cochrane Controlled Register of Trials.