Michel Klein

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | VU · Department of Artificial Intelligence

Young adulthood is a period of high risk for the development of mental health concerns. Increasing well-being among young adults is important to prevent mental health concerns and their consequences. Self-compassion has been identified as a modifiable trait with the potential to protect against mental health concerns. An online self-guided mental h...

Abstract Background Recruiting participants for lifestyle programmes is known to be challenging. Insights into recruitment strategies, enrolment rates and costs are valuable but rarely reported. We provide insight into the costs and results of used recruitment strategies, baseline characteristics and feasibility of at-home cardiometabolic measureme...

The pathway through which behavior change techniques have an effect on the behavior of an individual is referred to as the Mechanism of Action (MoA). Digitally enabled behavior change interventions could potentially benefit from explicitly modelling the MoA to achieve more effective, adaptive, and personalized interventions. For example, if ‘motiva...

With an ageing population, healthy ageing becomes more important. Healthy nutrition is part of this process and can be supported in many ways. The PROMISS trial studies the effect of increasing protein intake in older adults on their physical functioning. Within this trial, a sub-study was performed, researching the added effect of using a diet-tra...

Health-related work absenteeism has an extensive economic and societal impact. Digital health interventions at the workplace can play a beneficial role in reducing the risks of absenteeism. However, the effects of these health interventions are rarely explored in terms of predicting work absenteeism. This paper presents the outcomes of a six month...

Behaviour change techniques are considered as effective means for changing behaviour, but with the increase of its use we also see interest in their exact working principles. This is required to make informed choices about when to apply which technique. Computational models that describe human behavior can be helpful for this. In this paper a few b...

Serious games and gamification is a popular and growing field, commercially and for academic research. This paper aims to give an overview of a specific domain within the field of serious gaming and gamification; the field of serious games and gamification to empower vulnerable target groups. This overview contributes to a better understanding of t...

Introduction Short-term metabolic and observational studies suggest that protein intake above the recommended dietary allowance of 0.83 g/kg body weight (BW)/day may support preservation of lean body mass and physical function in old age, but evidence from randomised controlled trials is inconclusive. Methods and analysis The PRevention Of Malnutr...

With the increased understanding of human behavior and the systematic reporting of a different mechanism through which the behaviors can be influenced, autonomous coaching systems are emerging. In this paper, a generic framework, based on the behavior change ontology, for health behavior change support systems is presented. In the framework, all th...

Bluetooth (BT) data has been extensively used for recognizing social patterns and inferring social networks, as BT is widely present in everyday technological devices. However, even though collecting BT data is subject to random noise and may result in substantial measurement errors, there is an absence of rigorous procedures for validating the qua...

Background: Unhealthy lifestyle behaviours such as unhealthy dietary intake and insufficient physical activity (PA) tend to cluster in adults with a low socioeconomic position (SEP), putting them at high cardiometabolic disease risk. Educational approaches aiming to improve lifestyle behaviours show limited effect in this population. Using environ...

Background: Research on digital technology to change health behavior has increased enormously in recent decades. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of this topic, knowledge and technologies from different research areas are required. Up to now, it is not clear how the knowledge from those fields is combined in actual applications. A comprehensive...

Background: Social network interventions targeted at children and adolescents can have a substantial effect on their health behaviors, including physical activity. However, designing successful social network interventions is a considerable research challenge. In this study, we rely on social network analysis and agent-based simulations to better...

This paper introduces a system with persuasive communication to improve the diet compliance and adherence of participants of the PROMISS-project. For this persuasive communication different strategies and ways of personalisation are used, in accordance with existing literature. Furthermore, as the target group is elderly users, the design is tailor...

Pervasive technologies such as Bluetooth (BT) are capable of detecting close proximity. As a result, they are increasingly used for deriving social networks. However, the validity and reliability of the inferred networks is questionable as evaluation procedures are often omitted. In this paper, we present a methodology for inferring and evaluating...

This exploratory study contributes with in-depth insights into the user acceptance of real-life personalized coaching in social fitness smartphone apps. We have developed a prototype social ltness app under a set of deened coaching concepts, where a dyad with strong social ties perform real-life exercises, set and track the progress of joint goals....

In this paper, a computational model for the motivation process is presented that takes into account the reward pathway for motivation generation and associative learning for maintaining motivation through Hebbian learning approach. The reward prediction error is used to keep motivation maintained. These aspects are backed by recent neuroscientific...

BACKGROUND Social network interventions targeted at children and adolescents can have a substantial effect on their health behaviours, including physical activity. However, designing successful social network interventions is a considerable research challenge. For example, it is unclear which criteria should be used to select influence agents that...

Background Insufficient physical activity (PA) is highly prevalent and associated with adverse health conditions and the risk of noncommunicable diseases. To increase levels of PA, effective interventions to promote PA are needed. Present-day technologies such as smartphones, smartphone apps, and activity trackers offer several possibilities in hea...

BACKGROUND Insufficient physical activity (PA) is highly prevalent and associated with adverse health conditions and the risk of noncommunicable diseases. To increase levels of PA, effective interventions to promote PA are needed. Present-day technologies such as smartphones, smartphone apps, and activity trackers offer several possibilities in hea...

Load balancing is an important topic in smart grid systems. Dynamic pricing is a common approach to achieve a better balance between renewable energy production and energy usage. This assumes that individual households adapt their energy usage patterns based on energy prices. However, the actual behaviour of consumers in a household is an uncertain...

Social network interventions targeted at children and adolescents can have substantial effects on their health behaviour, as this population group is exceptionally susceptible to peer and environmental influences. However, health campaigns often show limited societal impact , that can be partially explained by the lack of understanding of the socia...

The reduction of childhood obesity through the promotion of a healthy lifestyle is one of the most important public health challenges at the moment. It is known that the unhealthy habits of children can cause unavoidable side effects in their early stage of life, including both physical and mental consequences. This work considers that the physical...

Background: Initiating and maintaining a healthy lifestyle -including healthy eating and sufficient physical activity- is key for cardiometabolic health. A health-promoting environment can facilitate a healthy lifestyle, and may be especially helpful to reach individuals with a lower socio-economic status (SES). In the Supreme Nudge project, we wi...

Social and cognitive sciences’ knowledge about social behavior and social networks combined with the new computational machine learning techniques can facilitate the creation of bettŠer models. We propose and evaluate a new methodology for €finding personality traits of young adults involved in a network using hyper optimization algorithms. We used...

The epidemic of physical inactivity is a major health hazard in the modern society, therefore creating effec- tive and innovative health programs and interventions is important. This paper presents a novel approach in which person-to-person social support is incorporated in mHealth interventions for increasing physical activ- ity. Social support is...

Almost one third of the energy is used in the residential sector, and space heating is the largest part of energy consumption in our houses. Knowledge about the thermal characteristics of a house can increase the awareness of homeowners about the options to save energy, for example by showing that there is room for improvement of the insulation lev...

Insufficient physical activity is a major health concern. Choosing for active transport, such as cycling and walking, can contribute to an increase in activity. Fostering a change in behavior that prefers active transport could start with automated self-monitoring of travel choices. This paper describes an experiment to validate existing algorithms...

The growing interest in the role of social support in mental and physical health has led to the development of several intelligent systems that aim to use social mechanisms to simulate healthy behaviour. In this paper a computational model of a human agent is presented which describes the effect of social support on mood. According to the literatur...

Despite the well-known health benefits of physical activity, a large proportion of the population does not meet the guidelines. Hence, effective and widely accessible interventions to increase levels of physical activity are needed. Over the recent years, the number of health and fitness apps has grown rapidly, and they might form part of the solut...

This paper presents a computational cognitive model about political positioning inspired on recent insights from neuro-science and psychology. We describe a model that takes into consideration the individual structures of the brain and the environmental influences that may interfere on how a political positioning is shaped in a social media environ...

In this paper we introduce a new Android library, called ULTEMAT, for the delivery of ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) on mobile devices and we present its use in the MoodBuster app developed in the H2020 E-COMPARED project. We discuss context-aware, or event-based, triggers for the presentation of EMAs and discuss the potential they have to...

The adoption and maintenance of a healthy lifestyle is a fundamental pillar in the quest towards a healthy society. Modern (mobile) technology allows for increasingly intelligent systems that can help to optimize people’s health outcomes. One of the possible directions in such mHealth systems is the use of intelligent reasoning engines based on dyn...

Computational models of human processes are used for many different purposes and in many different types of applications. A common challenge in using such models is to find suitable parameter values. In many cases, the ideal parameter values are those that yield the most realistic simulation results. However, there are situations in which the goodn...

Lack of physical activity is an increasingly important health risk. Modern mobile technology, such as smartphones and digital measurement devices, provides new opportunities to tackle physical inactivity. This paper describes the design of a system that aims to encourage young adults to be more physically active. The system monitors the user’s beha...

Full-text view-only version of the paper can be accessed here:: http://rdcu.be/ut5k With this set of papers, we hope to contribute significantlyto a scientific approach to e-coaching for healthy lifestyles.We sincerely believe such a scientific approach is needed inthis growing field, as part of the identification and validationof valuable compone...

Physical inactivity is an increasingly serious global health problem, which implies a strong need for effective and engaging interventions. Smartphone technology offers new possibilities to address physical activity promotion. For app-based interventions to have an impact, both the effectiveness and user appreciation of the app are important. In th...

Social processes play a key role in health behaviour. Understanding the underlying mechanisms of such processes is important when designing health interventions with a social component. In this work, we apply a computational model of social contagion to a data set of 2,472 users of a physical activity promotion program. We compare this model’s pred...

Background The Active2Gether intervention is an app-based intervention designed to help and encourage young adults to become and remain physically active by means of personalized, real-time activity tracking and context-specific feedback. Objective The objective of our study was to describe the development and content of the Active2Gether interven...

BACKGROUND The Active2Gether intervention is an app-based intervention designed to help and encourage young adults to become and remain physically active by means of personalized, real-time activity tracking and context-specific feedback. OBJECTIVE The objective of our study was to describe the development and content of the Active2Gether interven...

The influence of social connections on human behaviour has been demonstrated in many occasions. This paper presents the analysis of the dynamic properties of longitudinal (335 days) community data (n=3,375 participants) from an online health promotion program. The community data is unique as it describes how the network has evolved since its incept...

The social environment of people is an important factor for the mental health. However, in many internet interventions for mental health the interaction with the environment has no explicit role. It is known that the social environment can help people to reduce the feelings of loneliness and has a positive impact on mood in particular. Participatio...

Smart thermostats can play an important role in achieving more economic energy usage in domestic situations. This paper focuses on the energy used for natural gas-based heating, and monitoring of gas usages versus indoor and outdoor temperatures over time. Two methods are presented that enable the smart thermostat to learn, over time, characteristi...

It is known that opinions, attitudes and emotions spread through social networks. Several of these cognitions influence behavioral choices. Therefore, it is assumed that the level of physical activity of a person is influenced by the activity levels of the people in its social network. We have performed an experiment with 20 participants between 19...

In this paper, a computational model of a human agent is presented which describes the effect of social support on mood. According to the literature, social support can either refer to the social resources that individuals perceive to be available or to the support that is actually provided in problematic situations. The proposed model distinguishe...

Engaging in sufficient physical activity has several beneficial effects on physical and mental health. Still, a large proportion of the Western population doesn't meet the guidelines of being moderately to vigorously active for a minimum of 30 minutes on at least five days a week. Mobile technology provides possibilities for personalized coaching s...

Dit artikel beschrijft de ervaringen binnen een onderzoek waarin een intelligente smartphone app is ontwikkeld om patiënten met een chronische ziekte te ondersteunen bij therapietrouw. De basisprincipes van het systeem en de ervaringen met het werven van patiënten voor een onderzoek naar de effectiviteit worden uiteengezet. Een van de knelpunten bi...

In this paper a computational model is presented that describes the role of emotion regulation to reduce the influences of negative events on long term mood. The model incorporates an earlier model of mood dynamics and a model for the dynamics of emotion generation and regulation. Example model simulations are described that illustrate how adequate...

In this paper a computational model is presented that describes the role of emotion regulation to reduce the influences of negative events on long term mood. The model incorporates an earlier model of mood dynamics and a model for the dynamics of emotion generation and regulation. Example model simulations are described that illustrate how adequate...

Coaching practices are rapidly changing due to advances in pervasive computing: behavior of coachees can unobtrusively be monitored in real time, and coaching can be remote or even fully automated. Fully autonomous e-coaching systems hold promise for improving people’s self-management, but also raise questions about the importance of human involvem...

This paper describes the development and the validation of an ambient system (AAL-VU) that empowers its users in self-management of daily activities and social connectedness. The system combines state-of-the-art psychological knowledge on elderly user requirements for sustained behavior change with modern ICT technology in suggesting an adaptive am...

Mobile applications have proven to be promising tools for supporting people in adhering to their health goals. Although coaching and reminder apps abound, few of them are based on established theories of behavior change. In the present work, a behavior change support system is presented that uses a computational model based on multiple psychologica...

Autonomous e-coaching systems have the potential to improve people's health behaviors on a large scale. The intelligent behavior change support system eMate exploits a model of the human agent to support individuals in adopting a healthy lifestyle. The system attempts to identify the causes of a person's non-adherence by reasoning over a computatio...

Social decision making under stressful circumstances may involve strong emotions and contagion from others. Recent developments in Social Neuroscience have revealed neural mechanisms by which social contagion of cognitive and emotional states can be realised. In this paper, based on these mechanisms, an agent-based computational model is proposed....

A healthy lifestyle contributes to better health and helps diminish risks for chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease or diabetes. Moreover, people who have already developed a chronic illness often improve or minimize their symptoms by maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Although coaching apps that support people in attaining their healthy g...

A model-based agent system model for medicine usage management is presented and formally analysed. The model incorporates an intelligent ambient agent model that has an explicit representation of a dynamical system model to estimate the medicine level in the patient's body by simulation, is able to analyse whether the patient intends to take the me...