Mobile Apps and Wearables for Health Management, Analytics, and Decision Making Minitrack

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Mobile applications, wearables, and Social Media are dramatically influencing how clinicians, caregivers, patients and their families manage care processes. Further, they have the potential to facilitate the design and development of superior healthcare delivery. In addition, there is a trend to foster active patient participation in their care and we are witnessing a plethora of emerging technologies to assist in this regard. The data collected enable sophisticated analysis and smart decision making. In this minitrack, we focus on how such technologies might be utilized to address the challenges faced by healthcare management such as escalating cost pressures, a growing aging population, an increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, and a move to a preventive care focus. Integral to these solutions is a patient-centric view in order to satisfy consumer expectations and provide high quality care. This minitrack provides an outlet for all research focused on health and wellness related mobile technologies, applications, and data analytics. Selected papers will be fast-tracked for a special issue in Health and Technology published by Springer.

We welcome research in progress or completed research papers that address technological aspects, applications, use cases, theories, and models as well as other critical issues, including but not limited to:

  • Innovative Apps, wearables, and Social Media solutions for chronic disease management and fitness/wellness
  • Mobile Apps to support health and fitness monitoring
  • Online social networks for self-care and healthcare information exchange
  • Big Data, its generation, collection, and implications for health and wellness
  • Analytics of health-related sensor data and social media data
  • Self-management and self-quantifying technologies to assist fitness and wellness
  • Sensor-based solutions for treatment tracking and tracing and compliance control
  • Mobile and ambient solutions to manage epidemics, pandemics, and health crises
  • Methodologies, models, and frameworks to support mobile health management
  • Business models and cost-effective concepts to support patient centric healthcare
  • Mobile solutions for healthcare professionals and consumers
  • Impact of Affordable Care, Meaningful Use and similar initiatives on design, development, adoption, and analytics of mobile Apps and wearables
  • Regulatory, privacy, and security issues with mobile solutions in healthcare

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Freimut Bodendorf (Primary Contact)
University of Erlangen-Nüremberg, Germany
Email: freimut.bodendorf@fau.de

Nilmini Wickramasinghe
Deakin University, Australia
Email: n.wickramasinghe@deakin.edu.au

Tuan Huy Ma
Fraunhofer Institute IIS Erlangen, Germany
Email: tuan-huy.ma@scs.fraunhofer.de

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Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    The Role of Fitbits in Corporate Wellness Programs: Does Step Count Matter?
    (2017-01-04) Giddens, Laurie; Leidner, Dorothy; Gonzalez, Ester
    Striving to promote the health and well-being of their workforce and decrease insurance expenditures, many organizations are incorporating wearable fitness trackers into their corporate wellness programs. Research suggests that these devices encourage individuals to make healthier choices; however, little is known about the drivers and impact of fitness trackers on employee health and well-being. We seek to fill this knowledge gap by investigating the following research questions: (1) what is the impact of wearable fitness device use on employee health and well-being? (2) what is the impact of wearable fitness device use on step count? Our results indicate that extended use has a positive impact on employee well-being and step count, which fully mediates the relationship between feature use and health. These findings have implications for research into wearable fitness trackers and, more specifically, for research on the uses of wearable fitness devices in corporate wellness programs.
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    The Adoption of Wearables for a Healthy Lifestyle: Can Gamification Help?
    (2017-01-04) Spil, Ton; Sunyaev, Ali; Thiebes, Scott; Van Baalen, Rolf
    Wearables are a novel device category that promotes healthy lifestyles, providing consumers with unforeseen health monitoring capabilities. Gamification, on the other hand, is an intriguing phenomenon that seeks to motivate people by applying game design elements to non-gaming contexts like healthcare. While increasing literature is available on wearables in healthcare and gamification in healthcare, thus far, little attention has been paid to the combination of both concepts. In this paper we take a first step towards closing this gap by looking at how gamification of health apps can provide consumers with a motivating and enticing interaction concept to drive the adoption of wearables for a healthy lifestyle. Thereby, we apply a technological and consumer market lens and analyze rich data from 40 interviews and an online survey. Our results highlight that although people show high interest in wearables and gamification, their combined added value is still unknown among potential consumers. A practical contribution of this paper is that industry should make the functionality and relevance much more clear. Activity tracking and fitness & health functionality are perceived as most important by (potential) consumers. \ \
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    SlipBuddy: A Mobile Health Intervention to Prevent Overeating
    (2017-01-04) Tulu, Bengisu; Ruiz, Carolina; Allard, Joshua; Acheson, Joseph; Busch, Andrew; Roskuski, Andrew; Heeringa, Gage; Jaskula, Victor; Oleski, Jessica; Pagoto, Sherry
    Obesity is one of the top health issues around the globe. Rapid adoption of smartphones presents an opportunity for delivering technology-based interventions that are designed to tackle behaviors that contribute to weight gain. Research shows that the vast majority of weight loss apps in the market place do not go beyond deploying tracking based strategies that are burdensome to the users. In this study, we present a new mobile app and an intervention system called SlipBuddy that puts less burden on users and implements stimulus control strategy to help users lose weight. We describe the SlipBuddy system in detail and present the results of the first phase of a pilot study. Our findings indicate that a mobile app that simply helps users identify and track overeating episodes can potentially result in weight loss.
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    Mobile Stress Recognition and Relaxation Support with SmartCoping: User-Adaptive Interpretation of Physiological Stress Parameters
    (2017-01-04) Reimer, Ulrich; Laurenzi, Emanuele; Maier, Edith; Ulmer, Tom
    The paper describes a mobile solution for the early recognition and management of stress based on continuous monitoring of heart rate variability (HRV) and contextual data (activity, location, etc.). A central contribution is the automatic calibration of measured HRV values to perceived stress levels during an initial learning phase where the user provides feedback when prompted by the system. This is crucial as HRV varies greatly among people. A data mining component identifies recurrent stress situations so that people can develop appropriate stress avoidance and coping strategies. A biofeedback component based on breathing exercises helps users relax. The solution is being tested by healthy volunteers before conducting a clinical study with patients after alcohol detoxification.
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    I3DermoscopyApp: Hacking Melanoma thanks to IoT technologies
    (2017-01-04) Di Leo, Giuseppe; Liguori, Consolatina; Paciello, Vincenzo; Pietrosanto, Antonio; Sommella, Paolo
    The paper introduces I3DermoscopyApp, a new declination of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm, designed to allow the early detection of melanoma. Even though artificial intelligence programs cannot outperform the diagnostic accuracy of expert dermatologists yet, they reveal to be very useful in providing second opinions to physicians with short clinical experience, thus improving significantly their diagnostic performance. \ \ Following this trend, an original integration of mobile app technology and well-known image processing algorithms allows the automatic analysis of pigmented skin lesions to help physicians apply a diagnostic method (Seven Point Check List) based on dermoscopy. The web-based platform makes the physician able to: i) store digital images captured by smartphones featured with a dermatoscope; ii) measure morphological and chromatic parameters of the skin lesion; iii) make a diagnostic decision according to the Seven Point Checklist method. \ \ A detailed description of the adopted techniques, together with the first validation results are reported.
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    How Do Patients Expect Apps to Provide Drug Information?
    (2017-01-04) Grube, Anton; Dehling, Tobias; Sunyaev, Ali
    Patients use various sources to obtain information on pharmaceutical drugs. Mobile health care applications (apps) providing drug information to users are increasingly made available and of rising importance for the health care domain. However, apps usually offer functionality that only medical professionals or vendors consider useful for patients, although their considerations are not likely to meet patient expectations. In our exploratory study, we identify 33 features patients expect in apps for drug information provision with interviews and empirically assess their perceived importance in an online survey. Results indicate that patients desire personalization features for provided information but not for the app interface. This work contributes to research and practice by identifying and empirically ranking drug information provision features patients find important. We furthermore establish a foundation for future research on effective mobile drug information provision and provide insights for practice on development of patient-centered mobile health apps.
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    Analyzing Affordances of Digital Occupational Health Systems
    (2017-01-04) Yassaee, Maedeh; Winter, Robert
    This study adopts two distinct perspectives, employer and employee, to analyze the affordances of digital occupational health (DOH) systems and their appropriation. Data were collected in the context of a European collaborative research project that aims at developing a data integration infrastructure for context-aware health surveillance at the workplace. For employers the main affordance was to detect and prevent the health issues of their workforce. The main affordance from employee’s point of view was the possibility of being more self-conscious at work. However, the application of these systems might instigate several tensions, in particular those between privacy and security / wellbeing, between work and leisure activities, and between work and leisure roles. The findings of this study allow to direct future research on DOH systems to focus and eventually derive design principles that promise DOH systems to gain better acceptance and create higher added-value for all involved stakeholders.
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    Introduction to Mobile Apps and Wearables for Health Management, Analytics, and Decision Making Minitrack
    (2017-01-04) Oinas-Kukkonen, Freimut; Wickramasinghe, Nilmini; Ma, Tuan Huy