Sex differences are repeatedly observed in spatial cognition tasks. However, the role of environmental factors such as gaming experience remains unclear. In this exploratory study, navigation and object-relocation were combined in a naturalistic virtual reality-based spatial task. The sample consisted of n = 53 Dutch children aged 9–11 years. Overall, girls (n = 24) and boys (n = 29) performed equally accurately, although there was an increase in accuracy with age for boys (ηp2 = 0.09). Boys navigated faster than girls (ηp2 = 0.29), and this difference increased with age (ηp2 = 0.07). More gaming experience in boys versus girls (Cohen’s d = 0.88) did not explain any result observed. We encourage future confirmatory studies to use the paradigm presented here to investigate the current results in a larger sample. These findings could be beneficial for optimizing spatial cognition training interventions.
Background Chronic stress is increasing in prevalence and is associated with several physical and mental disorders. Although it is proven that acute stress changes physiology, much less is known about the relationship between physiology and long-term stress. Continuous measurement of vital signs in daily life and chronic stress detection algorithms could serve this purpose. For this, it is paramount to model the effects of chronic stress on human physiology and include other cofounders, such as demographics, enabling the enrichment of a population-wide approach with individual variations. Objective The main objectives of this study were to investigate the effect of chronic stress on heart rate (HR) over time while correcting for weekdays versus weekends and to test a possible modulation effect by gender and age in a healthy cohort. Methods Throughout 2016 and 2017, healthy employees of technology companies were asked to participate in a 5-day observation stress study. They were required to wear two wearables, of which one included an electrocardiogram sensor. The derived HR was averaged per hour and served as an output for a mixed design model including a trigonometric fit over time with four harmonics (periods of 24, 12, 8, and 6 hours), gender, age, whether it was a workday or weekend day, and a chronic stress score derived from the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) as predictors. Results The study included 328 subjects, of which 142 were female and 186 were male participants, with a mean age of 38.9 (SD 10.2) years and a mean PSS score of 13.7 (SD 6.0). As main effects, gender (χ21=24.02, P<.001); the hour of the day (χ21=73.22, P<.001); the circadian harmonic (χ22=284.4, P<.001); and the harmonic over 12 hours (χ22=242.1, P<.001), over 8 hours (χ22=23.78, P<.001), and over 6 hours (χ22=82.96, P<.001) had a significant effect on HR. Two three-way interaction effects were found. The interaction of age, whether it was a workday or weekend day, and the circadian harmonic over time were significantly correlated with HR (χ22=7.13, P=.03), as well as the interaction of gender, PSS score, and the circadian harmonic over time (χ22=7.59, P=.02). Conclusions The results show a relationship between HR and the three-way interaction of chronic stress, gender, and the circadian harmonic. The modulation by gender might be related to evolution-based energy utilization strategies, as suggested in related literature studies. More research, including daily cortisol assessment, longer recordings, and a wider population, should be performed to confirm this interpretation. This would enable the development of more complete and personalized models of chronic stress.
Background Although digital tools for healthy nutrition have shown great potential, their actual impact remains variable as digital solutions often do not fit users’ needs and barriers. This is especially poignant for priority communities in society. Involving these groups in citizen science may have great benefits even beyond the increase in knowledge of the lives and experiences of these groups. However, this requires specialized skills. Participants from priority groups could benefit from an approach that offers sensitization and discussion to help them voice their needs regarding healthy nutrition and technology to support healthy eating. Objective This study aimed to gather insights into people’s thoughts on everyday eating practices, self-regulation in healthy eating, and skill acquisition and on applying technological innovations to these domains. Methods Participants answered 3 daily questionnaires to garner their current practices regarding habits, self-regulation, skills, and technology use surrounding healthy eating and make it easier for them to collect their thoughts and experiences (sensitization). Within a week of filling out the 3 questionnaires, participants took part in a web-based focus group discussion session. All sessions were transcribed and analyzed using a thematic qualitative approach. Results A total of 42 people took part in 7 focus group interviews of 6 people each. The analysis showed that participants would like to receive support from technology for a broad range of aspects of nutrition, such as measuring the effect their personal nutrition has on their individual health, providing them with reliable product information, giving them practical guidance for healthy eating and snacking, and reducing the burden of registering food intake. Technology should be easy to use, reduce burdens, and be tailored to personal situations. Privacy and cost were major concerns for the participants. Conclusions This study shows that people from low– and medium–socioeconomic-status groups have a need for specific support in tailoring their knowledge of healthy nutrition to their own situation and see technology as a means to achieve this.
BACKGROUND Although digital tools for healthy nutrition have shown great potential, their actual impact remains variable, because digital solutions often do not fit users’ needs and barriers. This is especially poignant for priority communities in society. Involving these groups in Citizen Science may have great benefits, even beyond the increase of knowledge about the lives and experiences of these groups. However, this requires specialised skills. Participants from priority groups could benefit from an approach that offers sensitization, gentle and safe provocation, and discussion, to help them voice their needs regarding (digital technology for) healthy nutrition. OBJECTIVE The study aims to gather insights on people’s thoughts on (applying technological innovations for) everyday eating practices, in self-regulation (for instance of snacking), and skill acquisition. METHODS Participants answered three daily questionnaires, to garner their current practices regarding habits, self-regulation, skills, and technology use surrounding healthy eating, and to make it easier for them to collect their thoughts and experiences (sensitisation). Within a week after filling out the three questionnaires, participants took part in an online focus group discussion session. Part of this discussion was a brief ‘provotyping’ exercise in which participants were presented with digital solutions for measuring health determinants. All sessions were transcribed and analysed using a thematic qualitative approach. RESULTS 42 people took part in 7 focus group interviews of six people each. The analysis showed that participants would like to receive support from technology for a broad range of aspects of nutrition, such as in measuring the effect their personal nutrition has on their individual health; providing them with reliable product information; giving them practical guidance for healthy eating and snacking; and reducing the burden of registering food intake. Technology should be easy to use, reduce burdens, and be tailored to personal situations. Privacy and cost are major concerns to the participants. CONCLUSIONS The present study shows that people from low and medium-socioeconomic status groups have a need for specific support in tailoring their knowledge of healthy nutrition to their own situation, and see technology as a means to achieve this.
Monitoring well-being with mobile and wearable devices has become an important component for the development of preventive interventions for stress-related psychopathology. Here, we investigated the potential of daily-life psychological and physiological measures from Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) and Ecological Physiological Assessments (EPA), as well as their combination, for predicting long-term stress resilience. We operationalized resilience as inverse stressor reactivity (SR) at multiple measurement time points across a six-month period of longitudinal assessments. This allowed us to explicitly separate the contributions from between-subject and within-subject variances in EMA and EPA measures to interindividual differences in SR and intraindividual fluctuations in SR over time. We first used linear mixed models to understand how individual EMA items and EPA features are associated with SR, after which we trained machine learning models (random forest regression) to predict either a participant’s average SR score or their weekly individual SR scores from EMA, EPA or combined EMA and EPA data. We identified significant associations between changes in SR and various psychological and physiological measures from EMA and EPA, respectively – both between-subject and within-subject – suggesting that these measures can be used for monitoring resilience in daily life. We furthermore successfully demonstrate that SR scores can be predicted with moderate accuracy using machine learning models that are trained on EMA data, and that these models perform best when considering within-subject variance by predicting weekly SR scores. Our findings may have implications for future research on daily-life measures and stress resilience, as well as the development of clinical applications targeting the early detection and prevention of stress-related disorders through personalized just-in-time adaptive interventions.
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