In accordance with the global trend, in The Netherlands approximately 45% of the population is overweight. Existing studies show that patient self-management can reduce these figures, but medical non-adherence is a persistent problem. eHealth can potentially increase adherence to self-management. Consequently, we designed a persuasive computer assistant and evaluated its influence on self-management, i.e., the use of an online lifestyle diary called DieetInzicht.nl. The assistant is represented by an animated iCat, which shows different facial expressions and provides cooperative feedback following principles from the motivational interviewing method. We conducted a randomized controlled trial with 118 overweight people over a period of four weeks and studied the difference between diary use with and without computer assistant feedback. Results show that the computer assistant contributed to filling in the diary more frequently, reduced the decline in motivation to perform self-management, lowered the (reported) BMI, and improved the ease of use. Furthermore, diary use increased knowledge of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Finally, personal characteristics, i.e., locus of control, vocabulary, computer experience, age, gender, education level and initial BMI, explained the variance in the diary use and its outcome. Of the 118 participants 35 filled in the closing survey, covering motivation, BMI, lifestyle knowledge and ease of use, which implies that the findings based on these results are mainly representative for motivated participants. In general, this study shows that the Dieetinzicht eHealth service, including a personal computer assistant, is likely to support motivated overweight people and lifestyle related diseases to get a better insight in and adhere to their self-management. : O.A.BlansonHenkemans@TUDelft.n. 0928-7329/09/$17.00 2009 -IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved 254 O.A. Blanson Henkemans et al. / Online lifestyle diary with assistant for self-managementhealth care system towards a more independent, self-determining position wherein the emphasis lies on self-management.Self-management consists of activities undertaken by individuals, families, and communities with the intention of preventing disease, limiting illness, and restoring health [27]. It aims at educating and increasing the patient's intrinsic motivation, which in turn can lead to stimulation of medical adherence [31]. Examples of self-management activities are maintaining a healthy diet [17,25] and performing physical activities [10,23]. Strikingly, although people are well informed of the impact of being overweight on their life and from the benefit of self-management, treatment non-adherence is a persistent problem [15,20]. eHealth can potentially stimulate adherence to self-management [1,26,34,42]. Remote care for people at home through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has multiple benefits, such as lowering costs [18], aging in place [36], motivating the patient [19] developing health literacy [28,33],...
This research describes an approach to objective assessment of mental workload, by analyzing differences in pupil diameter and several aspects of eye movement (fixation time, saccade distance, and saccade speed) under different levels of mental workload. In an experiment, these aspects were measured by an eye-tracking device to examine whether these are indeed indicators for mental workload. Pupil diameter and fixation time both show a general significant increase if the mental workload increases while saccade distance and saccade speed do not show any significant differences. This assessment of mental workload could be a trigger for aiding the operator of an information system, in order to meet operational requirements.
Mobile information systems aid first responders in their tasks. Support is often based on mobile maps. People have different preferences for map orientations (heading-up or north-up), but map orientations also have different advantages and disadvantages. In general north-up maps are good for building up situation awareness and heading-up maps are better for navigational tasks. Because of heavily loaded visual modalities, we expect that tactile waypoint information can enhance navigation speed and situation awareness. In this paper we describe an experiment conducted in a synthetic task environment, in which we examined the effect of heading-up and north-up displays on search and rescue performance of first responders, and if adding the tactile display improves performance.
In large ubiquitous computing environments it is hard for users to identify and activate the electronic services that match their needs. This user study compares the newly developed service matcher system with a conventional system for identifying and selecting appropriate services. The study addresses human factors issues such as usability, trust and service awareness. With the conventional system users have to browse a hierarchical list of currently available services and activate the service that they think satisfies their current needs. With the service matcher users just enter their current need using natural language, after which a wizard, emulating an existing service matcher algorithm, searches for and activates a matching service based on the given need and the users' location and gaze direction. This study shows that with the hierarchical list, only 66% of the tasks are solved correctly, and females score significantly worse than males. With the service matcher, the performance increases significantly to 84% correctly performed tasks and the gender difference disappears.
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