Jan David Smeddinck

Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital Health and Prevention · Data Analytics & Digital Health Technology

Consumer‐grade optical heart rate (HR) sensors emerged as promising tools to monitor volume and intensity of physical activity (PA). However, no validation study of optical HR sensors included recent comprehensive validation recommendations, required for facilitating usage for medical purposes. Validity of HR data measured with four consumer‐grade...

https://esc365.escardio.org/presentation/282733

Objective Digital health interventions for behaviour change are usually complex interventions, and intervention developers should ‘articulate programme theory’, that is, they should offer detailed descriptions of individual intervention components and their proposed mechanisms of action. However, such detailed descriptions often remain lacking. The...

Background Regular physical activity (PA) comes with a multitude of benefits. However, most of them only become apparent after some time, while motivational ‘costs’ (e. g., exertion or fatigue) are immediate. Therefore, PA engagement requires individuals to overcome immediate costs in favor of longer-term benefits. The capacity to achieve that, how...

BACKGROUND Advancements in technologies and increased adoption of wearables and smartphones by individuals have led to an abundance of patient-generated healthcare data. These data, when used effectively, could help to further augment the process of shared decision-making to enable patient-centred care. However, the possible utilization of patient-...

Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) represents an important steppingstone for many cardiac patients into a more heart-healthy lifestyle to prevent premature death and improve quality of life years. However, CR is underutilized worldwide. In order to support the development of targeted digital health interventions, this narrative review (I) provides underst...

BACKGROUND There has been a surge in the development of applications that aim to improve health, physical activity (PA), and well-being through behavior change. These apps often focus on creating a long-term and sustainable impact on the user. Just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) based on passive sensing of the current user context (e.g., f...

Background: Shared decision making (SDM) between healthcare professionals and persons with CVD can have a positive impact on motivation, adherence, or sustainability regarding long-term goals and integration of cardiovascular disease (CVD) rehabilitation in the everyday lives of persons with CVD. SDM can foster the transition between regular heart-...

p>Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common cardiac arrhythmia causing severe complications if left untreated. Due to its sporadic nature, early detection often requires longitudinal ambulatory electrocardiogram (ECG) screening. Recently, deep learning (DL) has gained prominence in analysing long-term ECG and automating AF detection. However, like any m...

p>Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a common cardiac arrhythmia causing severe complications if left untreated. Due to its sporadic nature, early detection often requires longitudinal ambulatory electrocardiogram (ECG) screening. Recently, deep learning (DL) has gained prominence in analysing long-term ECG and automating AF detection. However, like any m...

Background: The Modular Open Research Platform (MORE) is being developed as an open-source platform for long-term situated digital health (DH) research and observations with the potential to facilitate studies, evaluations of DH interventions, and remote telehealth monitoring. Objectives: To implement an iterative development approach that integ...

The JITAI is an intervention design to support health behavior change. We designed a multi-level modeling framework for JITAIs and developed a proof-of-concept prototype (POC). This study aimed at investigating the usability of the POC by conducting two usability tests with students. We assessed the usability and the students’ workload and success...

BACKGROUND Diet and nutrition choices play an important role in individual health and well-being, as well as for environmental sustainability. The point of purchase presents a decisive moment that determines following consumption and can be influenced by many contextual factors. It therefore offers opportunities for digital technologies to support...

Background Smartphone apps can aid consumers in making healthier and more sustainable food purchases. However, there is still a limited understanding of the different app design approaches and their impact on food purchase choices. An overview of existing food purchase choice apps and an understanding of common challenges can help speed up effectiv...

Just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) can promote behavior change in patients. It was the aim of our study to make JITAIs adaptable, i.e., to configure JITAIs for different purposes and to personalize them for different participants, whilst enabling central maintenance and integrated data analysis across deployments and individuals. We prese...

Background: Digital technology uses in cardiology have become a popular research focus in recent years. However, there has been no published bibliometric report that analyzed the corresponding academic literature in order to derive key publishing trends and characteristics of this scientific area. Objective: We used a bibliometric approach to ident...

Typing on mobile devices is a common and complex task. The act of typing itself thereby encodes rich information, such as the typing method, the context it is performed in, and individual traits of the person typing. Researchers are increasingly using a selection or combination of experience sampling and passive sensing methods in real-world settin...

In our data-centric world, most services rely on collecting and using personal data. The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to enhance individuals' control over their data, but its practical impact is not well understood. We present a 10-participant study, where each participant filed 4-5 data access requests. Through interviews ac...

BACKGROUND Digital technology uses in cardiology have become a popular research focus in recent years. However, there has been no published bibliometric report that analyzed the corresponding academic literature in order to derive key publishing trends and characteristics of this scientific area. OBJECTIVE We used a bibliometric approach to identi...

Smartphones increasingly serve as the source for, or to aggregate, a considerable amount of data that can be relevant in public health emergencies. Hence the sharing and utilisation of mobile health data, for example to help control the spread of communicable diseases, has become a relevant issue, with the COVID-19 pandemic adding a sudden urgency...

As the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many to work remotely from home, collaborating solely through digital technologies, a growing population of remote home workers are faced with profound wellbeing challenges. Passive sensing devices and ambient feedback have great potential to support the wellbeing of the remote workers, but there is a lack of bac...

There is growing evidence that digital peer-support networks can have a positive influence on behaviour change and wellbeing outcomes for people who harm themselves and others. However, making and sustaining such networks are subject to ethical and pragmatic challenges, particularly for perpetrators of domestic violence whom pose unique risks when...

As digital technologies become more prevalent there is a growing awareness of the importance of good security and privacy practices. The tools and techniques used to achieve this are typically designed with the living user in mind, with little consideration of how they should or will perform after the user has died. We report on two workshops carri...

BACKGROUND Mental Health Applications (MHAs) provide opportunities for accessible, immediate and innovative approaches to better understand mental health disorders especially those with high burden such as Bipolar Disorder (BD). Many MHAs have been developed but few have had their effectiveness evaluated. OBJECTIVE This systematic scoping review e...

Introduction: The immediate impact of COVID-19 on morbidity and mortality has raised the need for accurate and real time data monitoring and communication. The aim of this study is to document initial observations from multiple digital services providers during the COVID-19 crisis, especially those related to mental health and wellbeing. Materials...

Measure user experience in MR (i.e., AR/VR) user studies is essential. Researchers apply a wide range of measuring methods using objective (e.g., biosignals, time logging), behavioral (e.g., gaze direction, movement amplitude), and subjective (e.g., standardized questionnaires) metrics. Many of these measurement instruments were adapted from use-ca...

In increasingly digitalised societies, government initiatives to ensure that public services remain accessible for everyone typically focus on the digital inclusion of older adults. However, by solely viewing older adults as passive recipients or consumers of services, digital inclusion strategies under-emphasise the concept of digital participatio...

Physical activity plays a major role both in prevention and in the treatment of afflictions linked to a modern sedentary lifestyle and improvements on life expectancy, for example though the application area of physiotherapy. Motion-based games for health (MGH) are being discussed in research and industry for their ability to play a supportive role...

With the advent of mobile games and the according growing and competitive market, game user research can provide valuable insights and a competitive edge if methods and procedures are employed that match the distinct challenges that mobile devices, games and usage scenarios induce. We present a summary of parameters that frame the research setup an...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a frequently used term-and has seen decades of use-in the video games industry. Yet, while academic AI research recently produced notable advances both in different methods and in real-world applications, the use of modern AI techniques, such as deep learning remains curiously sparse in commercial video games. Relate...

Virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) is a promising approach in treating phobias such as fear of heights (acrophobia). VRET provides an effective, cost-efficient, scalable and individually adaptable alternative to traditional exposure therapy. To further foster the potential of VRET, a novel concept called Playful User-generated Treatment (PUT)...

Overcoming a range of challenges that traditional therapy faces, virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) yields great potential for the treatment of phobias such as acrophobia, the fear of heights. We investigate this potential and present playful user-generated treatment (PUT), a novel game-based approach for VRET. Based on a requirement analysis...

Many application areas ranging from serious games for health to learning by demonstration in robotics, could benefit from large body movement datasets extracted from textual instructions accompanied by images. The interpretation of instructions for the automatic generation of the corresponding motions (e.g. exercises) and the validation of these mo...

Many online games suffer when players drop off due to lost connections or quitting prematurely, which leads to match terminations or game-play imbalances. While rule-based outcome evaluations or substitutions with bots are frequently used to mitigate such disruptions, these techniques are often perceived as unsatisfactory. Deep learning methods hav...

Balancing games and producing content that remains interesting and challenging is a major cost factor in the design and maintenance of games. Dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) can successfully tune challenge levels to player abilities, but when implemented with classic heuristic parameter tuning (HPT) often turns out to be very noticeable, e.g. a...

This paper provides a critical examination of how digital systems within a charitable organisation in the North of England are being used to both support and challenge male perpetrators of domestic violence. While there exists a range of digital tools to support the victim-survivors of domestic violence, no tools are available to challenge the abus...

Finding and maintaining the right level of challenge with respect to the individual abilities of players has long been in the focus of game user research (GUR) and game development (GD). The right difficulty balance is usually considered a prerequisite for motivation and a good player experience. Dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) aims to tailor d...

The prevalence of a sedentary lifestyle is a major contributor to many chronic afflictions in modern society. Objective study and monitoring to gain an accurate understanding of situated sedentary behavior, for example when at home, present considerable challenges, e.g. regarding ecological validity. Non-intrusive monitoring based on Wi-Fi signals...

Due to a steady increase in popularity, player demands for (online) video game content are growing to an extent in which consistency and novelty in challenges is hard to attain. Challenges in balance and error-coping accumulate. We introduce the concept of deep player behavior models by applying machine learning techniques to individual, atomic dec...

The concept of providing power-ups and other rewards to players in sedentary gaming sessions based on prior engagement in beneficial activities, such as exercising, has recently been explored under the term pervasive accumulated context exergames (PACE). Such games have less special requirements and may appeal to a broader audience than regular exe...

One fundamental way how players relate to games is through the avatar they are represented by. In this work, we explore the impact of realtime adjustment of avatar appearance (visual body weight) on player motivation in exergames. Our results draw a mixed picture: while qualitative findings show that players were aware of adaptations, quantitative...

We present a case study of Mooqita, a platform to support learners in online courses by enabling them to earn money, gather real job task experiences, and build a meaningful portfolio. This includes placing optional additional assignments in online courses. Learners solve these individual assignments, provide peer reviews for other learners, and gi...

The general promise of employing the motivational power of games for serious purposes, such as performing physiotherapy exercises, is well-established. However, game user research discusses both the approach of gamification, i.e. adding game-elements on to a task-focused application and of serious games, i.e. injecting task-focused elements into a...

Room-scale mapping facilitates natural locomotion in virtual reality (VR), but it creates a problem when encountering virtual walls. In traditional video games, player avatars can simply be prevented from moving through walls. This is not possible in VR with room-scale mapping due to the lack of physical boundaries. Game design is either limited by...

Enabling multiple-purpose robots to follow textual instructions is an important challenge on the path to automating skill acquisition. In order to contribute to this goal, we work with physical exercise instructions as an everyday activity domain where textual descriptions are usually focused on body movements. Body movements are a common element a...

Instructions for physical exercises leave many details underspecified that are taken for granted and inferred by the intended reader. For certain applications, such as generating virtual action visualizations from such textual instructions, advanced text processing is needed, requiring interpretation of both implicit and explicit information. This...

Physical exercise instruction sheets are often difficult to understand. In most cases considerable information remains implicit, which also poses a considerable hurdle regarding potential machine understanding. Major missing information types include the source and destination location of a human movement. We present a Bayesian network for extracti...

With ICARUS, we introduce a framework for autonomous video game playing, testing, and bug reporting. We report on the design rationale, the practical implementation, and its use in game development industry projects. The underlying solving mechanic is based on discrete reinforcement learning in a dualistic fashion, encompassing volatile short-term...

Digital motion-based games with affordable tracking methods for full body tracking allow users to play computer games controlled with body movements. They can be used as so called exergames, combining exercises and games. Exergames have three major benefits: (1) they can raise motivation for doing exercises through immersive interactive game play;...

Current eye tracking technologies have a number of drawbacks when it comes to practical use in real-world settings. Common challenges, such as high levels of daylight, eyewear (e.g. spectacles or contact lenses) and eye make-up, give rise to noise that undermines their utility as a standard component for mobile computing, design, and evaluation. To...

Locomotion in virtual reality (VR) remains challenging due to limitations of common input methods. Sedentary input devices may endanger immersion, real-to-virtual world perception dissonance can lead to simulator sickness, and physical input devices such as framed walking dishes are often complex and expensive. We present a low-cost, easy to use, e...

Many people suffer from a decline in their motor abilities and their sense of balance. Such complications are often related to a sedentary life style or specific illnesses. Physiotherapy can help with improving the situation, however, a lack of motivation to perform repetitive exercises, as well as achieving an adequate quality of execution and lev...

Technological and medical advances are leading to great improvements in overall quality of life and life expectancy. However, these positive developments are accompanied by considerable challenges. The modern sedentary lifestyle and common afflictions that become more prevalent with age are contributing to considerable burdens on health care system...

Personalization and adaptivity can promote motivated usage, increased user acceptance, and user identification in serious games. This applies to heterogeneous user groups in particular, since they can benefit from customized experiences that respond to the individual traits of the players. In the context of games, adaptivity describes the automatic...

Health is an elementary foundation of prosperous human life. Average human life expectancy has never been as long as it is today and medical advances have greatly improved overall population health. However, modern societies are burdened by new complications in the form of lifestyle diseases which arise due to various aspects of modern life, such a...

Matching game difficulty to player ability is a crucial step toward a rewarding player experience, yet making difficulty adjustments that are effective yet unobtrusive can be challenging. This paper examines the impact of automatic and player-initiated difficulty adjustment on player experience through two studies. In the first study, 40 participan...