Considering patient safety in autonomous e-mental health systems - Detecting risk situations and referring patients back to human care

Background: Digital health interventions can fill gaps in mental healthcare provision. However, autonomous e-mental health (AEMH) systems also present challenges for effective risk management. To balance autonomy and safety, AEMH systems need to detect risk situations and act on these appropriately. One option is sending automatic alerts to...

Simulating the inner voice: a study of sound parameters

Introduction: Inner voice is estimated to occur at least a quarter of people’s conscious waking life. Much research work asserts that inner voice plays various important roles in cognitive functions, such as self-regulation, self-reflection, and so on. Virtual cognitions are a stream of simulated thoughts people can hear while emerged in a...

How should a virtual agent present psychoeducation? Influence of verbal and textual presentation on adherence

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: With the rise of autonomous e-mental health applications, virtual agents can play a major role in improving trustworthiness, therapy outcome and adherence. In these applications, it is important that patients adhere in the sense that they perform the tasks, but also that they adhere to the specific recommendations on...

Patient experiences with self-monitoring renal function after renal transplantation: results from a single-center prospective pilot study

Background: After a kidney transplantation, patients have to visit the hospital often to monitor for early signs of graft rejection. Self-monitoring of creatinine in addition to blood pressure at home could alleviate the burden of frequent outpatient visits, but only if patients are willing to self-monitor and if they adhere to the self...

An expressive virtual audience with flexible behavioral styles

Currently, expressive virtual humans are used in psychological research, training, and psychotherapy. However, the behavior of these virtual humans is usually scripted and therefore cannot be modified freely at runtime. To address this, we created a virtual audience with parameterized behavioral styles. This paper presents a parameterized...

Validity and reliability of the ehealth analysis and steering instrument

Background: eHealth services can contribute to individuals’ self-management, that is, performing lifestyle-related activities and decision making, to maintain a good health, or to mitigate the effect of an (chronic) illness on their health. But how effective are these services? Conducting a randomized controlled trial (RCT) is the golden...

Positive affective interactions: The role of repeated exposure and copresence

We describe and evaluate a new interface to induce positive emotions in users: a digital, interactive adaptive mirror. We study whether the induced affect is repeatable after a fixed interval (Study 1) and how copresence influences the emotion induction (Study 2). Results show that participants systematically feel more positive after an...

Using a robot to personalise health education for children with diabetes type 1: A pilot study

Objective Assess the effects of personalised robot behaviours on the enjoyment and motivation of children (8–12) with diabetes, and on their acquisition of health knowledge, in educational play. Methods Children (N = 5) played diabetes quizzes against a personal or neutral robot on three occasions: once at the clinic, twice at home. The personal...

I just have diabetes: Children’s need for diabetes self-management support and how a social robot can accommodate their needs

Children with type 1 diabetes need to self-manage their illness to minimize its impact on their long-term health. However, because children are still developing cognitively and emotionally, self-management is challenging. The European FP7 project, ALIZ-E, looks at how social robots can support children aged 8–12 years with their diabetes self...

Multimodal Child-Robot Interaction: Building Social Bonds

For robots to interact effectively with human users they must be capable of coordinated, timely behavior in response to social context. The Adaptive Strategies for Sustainable Long-Term Social Interaction (ALIZ-E) project focuses on the design of long-term, adaptive social interaction between robots and child users in real-world settings. In...

Distributed collaborative situation-map making for disaster response

A situation map that shows the overview of a disaster situation serves as a valuable tool for disaster response teams. It helps them to orientate their location and to make disaster response decisions. It is, however, a complicated task to rapidly generate a complete and comprehensive situation map of a disaster area, particularly due to the...

EEG alpha asymmetry, heart rate variability and cortisol in response to virtual reality induced stress

We propose to combine Virtual Reality (VR) and bio-neuro feedback to help treat stress-related disorders. As a first step in that direction, we here attempted to induce stress through VR and identify (neuro)physiological correlates. Nine participants performed a surveillance task in two different cities within VR while EEG, ECG and cortisol...

Effects of mobile support on situation awareness and navigation in a field and game environment

For surveillance and rescue operations, human navigation and situation awareness should be well-supported. However, proper testing of new and innovative mobile support is hard for such operations. Evaluations in field settings are expensive, difficult to control, potentially dangerous, and may sometimes be impossible to execute. Using a virtual...

Cognitive engineering of a military multi-modal memory restructuring system

Several methods have been proposed to treat combat veterans with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Still, a recent review reports on high drop-out and non response rates. This has motivated work in the design of a software application to support and increase the appeal of traditional face-to-face trauma-focused psychotherapy. The research...

Situated cognitive engineering for crew support in space

Space crews are in need for excellent cognitive support to perform nominal and off-nominal actions. This paper presents a coherent cognitive engineering methodology for the design of such support, which may be used to establish adequate usability, context-specific support that is integrated into astronaut's task performance and/or electronic...

Cognitive ergonomics for situated human-automation collaboration