Purpose: Reduced heart rate variability significantly increases cardiovascular mortality. Metabolic syndrome increases the cardiac autonomic dysfunction. Recently, increasing cardiovascular mortality has been reported in patients with schizophrenia. This study was done to compare heart rate variability between adults with and without schizophrenia and to compare the relationship of heart rate variability to metabolic syndrome in hospitalized patients with schizophrenia. Methods: This was a descriptive and correlational study in which 719 adults without schizophrenia and 308 adults with schizophrenia took part between May and June 2008. We measured the following: five-minute heart rate variability; high-frequency, low-frequency, the ratio of low-frequency to high-frequency, and the Standard Deviation of all the normal RR intervals. Data was also collected on metabolic syndrome, abdominal obesity, triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, blood pressure and fasting glucose. Results: The Standard Deviation of all the normal RR intervals values of heart rate variability indices were 1.53±0.18. The low-frequency and high-frequency values of heart rate variability indices were significantly higher in hospitalized patients with schizophrenia (3.89±1.36; 3.80±1.20) than those in the healthy participants (2.20±0.46; 2.10±0.46). There were no significant differences between the schizophrenic patients with and without metabolic syndrome. Conclusion: The results of this study indicate that schizophrenia patients have significantly lower cardiac autonomic control, but they have significantly higher low-frequency and high-frequency values than those of healthy adults. Use of antipsychotic drug may affect the autonomic nervous system in schizophrenic patients. Metabolic syndrome was not associated with cardiac autonomic control in schizophrenia patients.
Similar to a design process for designing graphical user interfaces, conversation designers often apply an iterative design process by defining a conversation flow, testing with users, reviewing user data, and improving the design. While it is possible to iterate on conversation design with existing chatbot prototyping tools, there still remain challenges in recruiting participants on-demand and collecting structured feedback on specific conversational components. These limitations hinder designers from running rapid iterations and making informed design decisions. We posit that involving a crowd in the conversation design process can address these challenges, and introduce ProtoChat, a crowd-powered chatbot design tool built to support the iterative process of conversation design. ProtoChat makes it easy to recruit crowd workers to test the current conversation within the design tool. ProtoChat's crowd-testing tool allows crowd workers to provide concrete and practical feedback and suggest improvements on specific parts of the conversation. With the data collected from crowd-testing, ProtoChat provides multiple types of visualizations to help designers analyze and revise their design. Through a three-day study with eight designers, we found that ProtoChat enabled an iterative design process for designing a chatbot. Designers improved their design by not only modifying the conversation design itself, but also adjusting the persona and getting UI design implications beyond the conversation design itself. The crowd responses were helpful for designers to explore user needs, contexts, and diverse response formats. With ProtoChat, designers can successfully collect concrete evidence from the crowd and make decisions to iteratively improve their conversation design.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.