ProHealth eCoach: user-centered design and development of an eCoach app to promote healthy lifestyle with personalized activity recommendations

Abstract Background Regular physical activity (PA), healthy habits, and an appropriate diet are recommended guidelines to maintain a healthy lifestyle. A healthy lifestyle can help to avoid chronic diseases and long-term illnesses. A monitoring and automatic personalized lifestyle recommendation system (i.e., automatic electronic coach or eCoach) with considering clinical and ethical guidelines, individual health status, condition, and preferences may successfully help participants to follow recommendations to maintain a healthy lifestyle. As a prerequisite for the prototype design of such a helpful eCoach system, it is essential to involve the end-users and subject-matter experts throughou…

A User-Centric Approach for Personalized Service Provisioning in Pervasive Environments

Published version of an article published in Wireless Personal Communications (2011). Also available from the publisher at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11277-011-0387-3 The vision of pervasive environments is being realized more than ever with the proliferation of services and computing resources located in our surrounding environments. Identifying those services that deserve the attention of the user is becoming an increasingly-challenging task. In this paper, we present an adaptive multi-criteria decision making mechanism for recommending relevant services to the mobile user. In this context, "Relevance" is determined based on a user-centric approach that combines both the reputation of the…

A REST-based publish/subscribe platform to support things-to-services communications

The term “Internet of Things” has been used widely in recent years, bringing up a grand idea of connecting physical objects with one another through both wired and wireless networks. Maturity of the Internet Protocol has pushed 21st century communications between devices to go all-IP, which includes everyday objects. Many new services are deployed in the “cloud”, utilising the Internet infrastructure and the Web, and information from everyday objects can play an important role. This paper presents an information integration platform which enables everyday objects to communicate with Internet services based on event-driven service-oriented architecture paradigm. A proof-of-concept prototype …

A Comparative Study to Analyze the Performance of Advanced Pattern Recognition Algorithms for Multi-Class Classification

This study aims to implement the following four advanced pattern recognition algorithms, such as “optimal Bayesian classifier,” “anti-Bayesian classifier,” “decision trees (DTs),” and “dependence trees (DepTs)” on both artificial and real datasets for multi-class classification. Then, we calculated the performance of individual algorithms on both real and artificial data for comparison. In Sect. 1, a brief introduction is given about the study. In the second section, the different types of datasets used in this study are discussed. In the third section, we compared the classification accuracies of Bayesian and anti-Bayesian methods for both the artificial and real-life datasets. In the four…

Usability Evaluation of a COPD Remote Monitoring Application

- Telemedicine applications have the potential to enhance patient’s safety at home by remote monitoring of chronic diseases. Telemedicine involves the interaction between multiple user groups through a system, making the usability aspect of such system crucial for the continuous, efficient and satisfactory use of the application. The main objective of this study was to carry out a usability evaluation in the field of a telemedicine application for remote monitoring of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients to improve the application’s user interface before system deployment. A field trial was performed with six COPD patients at their homes, continuously using the system’s app…

The EU project "United4Health": Results and experiences from automatic health status assessment in a Norwegian telemedicine trial system.

Introduction Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease require help in daily life situations to increase their individual perception of security, especially under worsened medical conditions. Unnecessary hospital (re-)admissions and home visits by doctors or nurses shall be avoided. This study evaluates the results from a two-year telemedicine field trial for automatic health status assessment based on remote monitoring and analysis of a long time series of vital signs data from patients at home over periods of weeks or months. Methods After discharge from hospital treatment for acute exacerbations, 94 patients were recruited for follow-up by the trial system. The system supported…

Teaching Methods in a Health and Social Informatics Master Program

Education is an important contribution to the digital transformation in society. In health care services, there is a need to combine knowledge in health science and information-and communication technologies. At the University of Agder in Norway, there is a Master's Program in Health and Social Informatics targeting students with health educational background. This paper shares the experiences on methods for teaching basic information-and communication technology to this student group. A quantitative study was made to evaluate the pedagogical methods and the organization of a technical master course with respondents from the last two classes. The experiences on the course execution and the …

An intelligent architecture for service provisioning in pervasive environments

Accepted version of an article from the conference: 2011 International Symposium on Innovations in Intelligent Systems and Applications (INISTA). Definitive published version available from IEEE: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/INISTA.2011.5946134 The vision of pervasive environments is being realized more than ever with the proliferation of services and computing resources located in our surrounding environments. Identifying those services that deserve the attention of the user is becoming an increasingly-challenging task. In this paper, we present an adaptive multi-criteria decision making mechanism for recommending relevant services to the mobile user. In this context Relevance is determined b…

A Decision-support Algorithm for Self-management of Anticoagulation Therapy Used in a Smartphone Application

Warfarin for anticoagulation therapy is used by patients with specific cardiovascular diseases to control the ability of blood clotting. Traditional ways for self-management of the therapy are based on paper forms and procedures. This paper presents an algorithm developed for the smartphone application “Warfarin Guide”, which is a computer-assisted decision-support system used to help patients with self-management of their anticoagulation therapy related to International Normalized Ratio (INR) values. The algorithm was based on clinical guidelines for Warfarin therapy and it was adapted for the software application to address challenges with regular INR checks and adjustments for temporary …

Human Coaching Methodologies for Automatic Electronic Coaching (eCoaching) as Behavioral Interventions With Information and Communication Technology: Systematic Review

Background We systematically reviewed the literature on human coaching to identify different coaching processes as behavioral interventions and methods within those processes. We then reviewed how those identified coaching processes and the used methods can be utilized to improve an electronic coaching (eCoaching) process for the promotion of a healthy lifestyle with the support of information and communication technology (ICT). Objective This study aimed to identify coaching and eCoaching processes as behavioral interventions and the methods behind these processes. Here, we mainly looked at processes (and corresponding models that describe coaching as certain processes) and the methods th…

Additional file 1 of ProHealth eCoach: user-centered design and development of an eCoach app to promote healthy lifestyle with personalized activity recommendations

Additional file 1. StaRI checklist for completion.

Media Delivery to Remote Renderers Controlled by the Mobile Phone

In today's content delivery solutions, service delivery and control are still tightly coupled, a service typically being delivered to the same device that controls the session. We present a solution that was designed with the goal to decouple service control and delivery. Using our approach, multimedia streaming services can be delivered to off-the-shelf DLNA devices in visited networks. The service provider receives information about the remote media player and access environment via a mobile phone. Proximity technologies (e.g. barcodes, NFC) of the control device are used for the exchange of required credentials. This paper describes a typical scenario and our prototype implementation.

An Automatic Ontology-Based Approach to Support Logical Representation of Observable and Measurable Data for Healthy Lifestyle Management: Proof-of-Concept Study

Background Lifestyle diseases, because of adverse health behavior, are the foremost cause of death worldwide. An eCoach system may encourage individuals to lead a healthy lifestyle with early health risk prediction, personalized recommendation generation, and goal evaluation. Such an eCoach system needs to collect and transform distributed heterogenous health and wellness data into meaningful information to train an artificially intelligent health risk prediction model. However, it may produce a data compatibility dilemma. Our proposed eHealth ontology can increase interoperability between different heterogeneous networks, provide situation awareness, help in data integration, and discover…

Learning Automaton Based On-Line Discovery and Tracking of Spatio-temporal Event Patterns

Published version of an article from the book: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2010, Volume 6230/2010, 327-338. The original publication is available at Springerlink. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15246-7_31 Discovering and tracking of spatio-temporal patterns in noisy sequences of events is a difficult task that has become increasingly pertinent due to recent advances in ubiquitous computing, such as community-based social networking applications. The core activities for applications of this class include the sharing and notification of events, and the importance and usefulness of these functionalites increases as event-sharing expands into larger areas of one’s life. Ironically, …

Sharing With Care - Multidisciplinary Teams and Secure Access to Electronic Health Records

Published: Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies Vol 5 2018

Wi-Sense: a passive human activity recognition system using Wi-Fi and convolutional neural network and its integration in health information systems

AbstractA human activity recognition (HAR) system acts as the backbone of many human-centric applications, such as active assisted living and in-home monitoring for elderly and physically impaired people. Although existing Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition methods report good results, their performance is affected by the changes in the ambient environment. In this work, we present Wi-Sense—a human activity recognition system that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to recognize human activities based on the environment-independent fingerprints extracted from the Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI). First, Wi-Sense captures the CSI by using a standard Wi-Fi network interface car…

Delivering Services to Residential Appliances by Utilizing Remote Resource Awareness

Service providers are nowadays offering a variety of services, and in particular multimedia content delivery. Besides, consumer appliances are increasingly becoming digitalized including support for communication networks. However, it is difficult, and in many cases impossible, to use these services with standard consumer appliances, such as TV and media player devices. Rather, usage is often restricted so that they can only be accessed through web browsers from PCs, mobile phones and similar terminals. This is unfortunate, because dedicated consumer appliances are often better suited to handle the content and thereby give consumers a better experience. Within this paper, three design appro…

Sharing With Care- Multidisciplinary Teams and Secure Access to Electronic Health Records

Published: Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies Vol 5 2018 Ensuring patient privacy and improving patient care quality are two of the most significant challenges faced by healthcare systems around the world. This paper describes the importance and challenges of effective multidisciplinary team treatment and the sharing of patient healthcare records in healthcare delivery. At present, electronic health records are used to create, manage and share patient healthcare information efficiently and effectively. The security and privacy concerns with sharing and the proper use of protected health information need to be highlighted…

Reference Design for Smart Collaborative Telehealth and Telecare Services Based on IoT Technologies

The demographic development shows aging societies through-out the globe, leading to higher demands on the health and care systems due to age-related disabilities, chronic diseases, etc. Telehealth and telecare services for more efficient support of health and care providers are needed, which can be significantly improved by the continuous technological developments in areas such as sensor devices, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud services, and data analysis. This paper addresses the potential of selected emerging technologies to make eHealth systems smarter, more collaborative and more efficient. As a result of the analysis of the most promising technological trends, characteristics of futur…

Security, Reliability and Usability of mHealth Environments

Mobile technologies confer mobility and autonomy on patients with the advantage of access to home care and health care services on demand. However, these benefits impose challenges to the future health care services. For instance, computation capacity of a conventional smartphone provides applications and services with sufficient power of calculation and automation to assist in daily life activities and medical purposes. Combined with a user-friendly interface, mobile technologies can be an easy and efficient manner to help people who are in a condition of cognitive deterioration or have a chronic disease which demands a close connection to near family members and/or to health care services.

Using SIP Presence for Remote Service Awareness

Residential networks usually protect its devices and services behind firewalls and use private IP addresses. Therefore, appliances within a residential network cannot be discovered and utilized from external networks by standardized technologies as UPnP. In this paper, we present our concept of “Service Presence”, based on the 3GPP Presence Service that makes the service presence information remotely discoverable.

Remote service usage through SIP with multimedia access as a use case

The IP Multimedia Subsystem is under deployment, as an IP-based service control and access infrastructure, but how it interconnects with residential appliances is currently unclear. With IMS access for the residential appliances they can be used as both service consumers and service providers. In this paper we present a protocol which allows residential services to be remotely invoked, through the IMS, and consumed in a different network, along with a prototype implementation and early results. With our protocol services of two distinct service protocol systems can cooperate.

Leveraging technology for healthcare and retaining access to personal health data to enhance personal health and well-being

Abstract Health data are a sensitive category of personal data. They can result in a high risk to individuals and health information-handling rights and opportunities unless there is a sufficient defense. Reasonable security standards are needed to protect electronic health records (EHRs). All personal data handling needs adequate explanation. Maintaining access to medical data, even in the developing world, would favor health and well-being across the world. Unfortunately, there are still countries that hinder the portability of medical records. Numerous occurrences have shown that it still takes weeks for medical data to be ported from one general physician to another. Cross-border portab…

eHealth Initiatives for The Promotion of Healthy Lifestyle and Allied Implementation Difficulties

Research in eHealth has opened a new dimension to improve personal healthcare with the help of information and communication technologies (ICT). eHealth is an ‘umbrella term’ for the use of ICT for health. Remote care-giving technologies (mHealth, Telehealth, Telemedicine) are an extended branch of eHealth initiatives. The concept of health e- Coaching is another promising initiative of eHealth research for real-time personalized lifestyle support. The focus of eHealth initiatives is to deliver high quality, evidence-based, secure, cost- effective, timely care to support people for sustaining a healthy lifestyle. However, the practical implementation of different eHealth initiatives has oft…

Conceptualization of a personalized ecoach for wellness promotion

Evidence-based health promotion programs implement clinical practice guidelines built upon results of clinical trials with a definite number of participants, collected during a specific period of time. Wearable technologies allow for continuous observation of wellness parameters of multiple citizens, combined with monitoring of activities and context parameters involved in citizens' wellness. A statistical inference model can describe the relation between multidimensional activities and context parameters, the wellness of an individual and a comparable reference group, utilizing machine learning techniques and knowledge from continuous observations of multiple citizens. This paper presents …

Curriculum Development of a Health Informatics Master Course in Understanding Technology

Education in health informatics is an important contribution to the digital transformation in health care services, and there is a need to combine health and technology competencies. Traditional ways with separation of health sciences and computer science have shortcomings, and there is need for individuals with a holistic view and relevant education background for improving the technology-supported clinical work processes. This paper presents how the curriculum was organised in a course in “Understanding Technology”, which was a part of a Master's Programme in Health Informatics. The course targeted different aspects of technology for students with a diverse background, and it was organise…

“Sven and the Media Portal” : A Nomadic Use Case for the Extended Home

The Networked and Electronic Media Technology Platform (NEM) [5] states that users will consume an “innovative mix of various media forms, delivered seamlessly over technologically transparent networks, to improve the quality, enjoyment and value of life. [6] visualizes a future use case and some of the challenges that need to be addressed before the NEM vision becomes reality.

User-Centered Design of a COPD Remote Monitoring Application Experiences from the EU-project United4Health

- Recent health reforms in Norway have produced changes at all levels of the health sector, bringing to light a need for technology solutions explicitly designed for enhancing end-user collaboration. Telemedicine technology can support in this context new services that enable communication across local borders, optimizing resources and increasing cost effectiveness. This study focuses on the user-centered design, iterative development and evaluation of the user interface of a mobile application for a new telemedicine service for remote monitoring of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients. The tablet device application was developed based on information gathered in a workshop and gro…

Identification of Risk Factors Associated with Obesity and Overweight-A Machine Learning Overview.

Social determining factors such as the adverse influence of globalization, supermarket growth, fast unplanned urbanization, sedentary lifestyle, economy, and social position slowly develop behavioral risk factors in humans. Behavioral risk factors such as unhealthy habits, improper diet, and physical inactivity lead to physiological risks, and &ldquo

Digital interventions on healthy lifestyle management: Systematic review

Background Digital interventions have tremendous potential to improve well-being and health care conveyance by improving adequacy, proficiency, availability, and personalization. They have gained acknowledgment in interventions for the management of a healthy lifestyle. Therefore, we are reviewing existing conceptual frameworks, digital intervention approaches, and associated methods to identify the impact of digital intervention on adopting a healthier lifestyle. Objective This study aims to evaluate the impact of digital interventions on weight management in maintaining a healthy lifestyle (eg, regular physical activity, healthy habits, and proper dietary patterns). Methods We conducted …

A Statistical Study to Analyze the Impact of External Weather Change on Chronic Pulmonary Infection in South Norway with Machine Learning Algorithms

In this paper, we analyzed the holistic impact of external weather on chronic pulmonary infection in the Agder region with traditional machine learning algorithms. Millions of people are diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). Our study is dedicated in the Agder region, the Southern part of Norway. Norway has four seasons – winter (December-February), late winter/spring (March-May), Summer (June-August), and Autumn (September-November) in a year with average annual temperature approx. 7.5 °C | 45.5 °F and an annual rainfall of 1260 mm or 49.6 in. in Kristiansand. As predicted by the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2016, Norway suffered from 8% mortality due to c(1)h…

Holistic System Design for Distributed National eHealth Services

Statistical Explorations and Univariate Timeseries Analysis on COVID-19 Datasets to Understand the Trend of Disease Spreading and Death

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Comparing Performance of Ensemble-Based Machine Learning Algorithms to Identify Potential Obesity Risk Factors from Public Health Datasets

Societal factors such as globalization, supermarket growth, rapid unplanned urbanization, sedentary lifestyle, economical distribution, and social position gradually develop behavioral risk factors in humans. Behavioral risk factors are unhealthy habits (consumption of tobacco and alcohol), improper diet (consumption of high calorific discretionary fast foods, sweet beverages), and physical inactivity. The behavioral risks may lead to physiological risks, body–energy imbalance. Obesity is one of the foremost lifestyle diseases that leads to other health conditions, such as cardiovascular disease (CVDs), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cancer, diabetes type II, hypertension, an…

A Proposed Access Control-Based Privacy Preservation Model to Share Healthcare Data in Cloud

Healthcare data in cloud computing facilitates the treatment of patients efficiently by sharing information about personal health data between the healthcare providers for medical consultation. Furthermore, retaining the confidentiality of data and patients' identity is a another challenging task. This paper presents the concept of an access control-based (AC) privacy preservation model for the mutual authentication of users and data owners in the proposed digital system. The proposed model offers a high-security guarantee and high efficiency. The proposed digital system consists of four different entities, user, data owner, cloud server, and key generation center (KGC). This approach makes…

Phone-Controlled Delivery of NGN Services into Residential Environments

The horizontally layered architecture of the IMS/NGN standards family enables the delivery of services independent of access network and requesting device. In this article, the authors propose a further separation of service control and delivery, allowing the requesting device - in particular a user's mobile phone - to invite other devices (we will focus on DLNA appliances) into the service delivery, enhancing both user experience and service design flexibility. The proposed solution builds on exploiting proximity technologies (e.g. barcodes, NFC) for pairing the control device with a remote environment. Motivated by scenarios, the architecture concepts are explained and a prototype that wa…

An Approach Towards Information Quality Management of Electronic Health Records

Electronic Health Records (EHR) management systems, have gained attention in many countries as public organizations working in health domain (such as hospitals and municipalities) use them to lift the quality of health care. EHRs are considered as the basis for establishing Health Information Service (HIS) systems. In spite of remarkable advantages of EHRs, the lack of quality metrics can reduce the efficiency of high level systems that are based on them. Particularly, it is smart to design a mechanism to assure the quality of data generated by sensors. In this paper, we propose an architecture in which EHRs are enriched with metadata to provide the information quality. Our architecture emp…

Warfarin Guide: Co-design of a Mobile Computer-Assisted Anticoagulant Therapy

Patients with some types of cardiovascular disease are prescribed anticoagulation therapy with Warfarin in order to control the ability of blood clotting. This work presents a co-designed mobile application, called Warfarin Guide, for a computer-assisted anticoagulant therapy. The application addresses the challenges that unexperienced patients may find when having to remember to regularly check their INR values and make temporary adjustments for INR value fluctuations that are not easy to interpret without direct medical advice. nivå1

The EU-project United4Health: User-centred design of an information system for a Norwegian telemedicine service.

Introduction Organizational changes of health care services in Norway brought to light a need for new clinical pathways. This study presents the design and evaluation of an information system for a new telemedicine service for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients after hospital discharge. Methods A user-centred design approach was employed composed of a workshop with end-users, two user tests and a field trial. For data collection, qualitative methods such as observations, semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire were used. Results User workshop’s outcome informed the implementation of the system initial prototype, evaluated by end-users in a usability laboratory. Several us…

Additional file 2 of ProHealth eCoach: user-centered design and development of an eCoach app to promote healthy lifestyle with personalized activity recommendations

Additional file 2. The outcome of the focus group discussion for RQ-1 in Workshop 1.

Additional file 3 of ProHealth eCoach: user-centered design and development of an eCoach app to promote healthy lifestyle with personalized activity recommendations

Additional file 3. The outcome of the focus group discussion for RQ-2 in Workshop 1.

Additional file 5 of ProHealth eCoach: user-centered design and development of an eCoach app to promote healthy lifestyle with personalized activity recommendations

Additional file 5. The outcome of the focus group discussion for RQ-4 in Workshop 1.

Additional file 4 of ProHealth eCoach: user-centered design and development of an eCoach app to promote healthy lifestyle with personalized activity recommendations

Additional file 4. The outcome of the focus group discussion for RQ-3 in Workshop 1.