André Calero Valdez

From cloud computing to mobile Internet, from user focus to culture and hedonism: The crucible of mobile health care and Wellness applications

With the rise of mobile Internet and cloud computing new ubiquitous medical services will emerge coinciding with changes in demographics and social structures. Mobile e-health and Wellness applications can help relieving the burden of accelerating health care costs due to aging societies. In order to leverage these new innovations a holistic approach must be considered. Facilitating user centered design, acceptance models for user diversity and cultural as well as hedonic aspects can lead to development of services that improve therapy compliance and can even change the youths lifestyle. An overview of such applications is presented and put into a cultural context.

Chances of increasing youth health awareness through mobile wellness applications

The poor general state of health of the Austrian youth - which is possibly representative for the western industrial world - will have dramatic effects on our health care system in years to come. Health risks among adolescents, including smoking, alcohol, obesity, lack of physical activity and an unhealthy diet, will lead to an increase in chronic diseases. A preventive measure against such a development could be to reinforce health awareness through the use of web and mobile applications supporting self observation and behavior change. In this paper, we present an overview of the latest developments in the area of mobile wellness and take a look at the features of applications that constitutes the current state of the art, as well as their shortcomings and ways of overcoming these. Finally, we discuss the possibilities offered by new technological developments in the area of mobile devices and by incorporating the characteristics that make up the Web 2.0.

Increase Physical Fitness and Create Health Awareness through Exergames and Gamification - The Role of Individual Factors, Motivation and Acceptance.

Demographic change and the aging population push health and welfare system to its limits. Increased physical fitness and increased awareness for health issues will help elderly to live independently for longer and will thereby reduce the costs in the health care system. Exergames seem to be a promising solution for promoting physical fitness. Still, there is little evidence under what conditions Exergames will be accepted and used by elderly. To investigate promoting and hindering factors we conducted a user study with a prototype of an Exergame. We contrasted young vs. elderly players and investigated the role of gamer types, personality factors and technical expertise on the performance within the game and changes in the attitude towards individual health after the game. Surprisingly, performance within the game is not affected by performance motivation but by gamer type. More importantly, a universal positive effect on perceived pain is detected after the Exergame intervention.

On Graph Entropy Measures for Knowledge Discovery from Publication Network Data

Many research problems are extremely complex, making interdisciplinary knowledge a necessity; consequently cooperative work in mixed teams is a common and increasing research procedure. In this paper, we evaluated information-theoretic network measures on publication networks. For the experiments described in this paper we used the network of excellence from the RWTH Aachen University, described in [1]. Those measures can be understood as graph complexity measures, which evaluate the structural complexity based on the corresponding concept. We see that it is challenging to generalize such results towards different measures as every measure captures structural information differently and, hence, leads to a different entropy value. This calls for exploring the structural interpretation of a graph measure [2] which has been a challenging problem.

Using mixed node publication network graphs for analyzing success in interdisciplinary teams

Large-scale research problems (e.g. health and aging, eonomics and production in high-wage countries) are typically complex, needing competencies and research input of different disciplines [1]. Hence, cooperative working in mixed teams is a common research procedure to meet multi-faceted research problems. Though, interdisciplinarity is --- socially and scientifically --- a challenge, not only in steering cooperation quality, but also in evaluating the interdisciplinary performance. In this paper we demonstrate how using mixed-node publication network graphs can be used in order to get insights into social structures of research groups. Explicating the published element of cooperation in a network graph reveals more than simple co-authorship graphs. The validity of the approach was tested on the 3-year publication outcome of an interdisciplinary research group. The approach was highly useful not only in demonstrating network properties like propinquity and homophily, but also in proposing a performance metric of interdisciplinarity. Furthermore we suggest applying the approach to a large research cluster as a method of self-management and enriching the graph with sociometric data to improve intelligibility of the graph.

Openness to accept medical technology - a cultural view

Technology acceptance is a widely acknowledged key player in explaining technology adoption. However, there is a notable knowledge gap concerning the impact of cultural factors on technology acceptance, especially in the medical sector. It is evident though that countries differ greatly regarding their technical proneness, development and usage habits what should have considerable impact on acceptance. This study compares the openness to accept medical technology in Germany, Poland and Turkey. 300 respondents (19-85 years, 56% women, 38% chronically ill) participated in a survey, in which the pros and cons for using medical technologies were examined as well as the underlying acceptance motives and utilization barriers. The effects of different cultures, but also of age, gender and health status were analyzed regarding their impact on acceptance patterns. Results reveal both, culturally insensitive as well culturally sensitive acceptance, with strong effects of gender and exercising frequency. Overall, the study corroborates the importance of cultural views on technology acceptance.

Mental models of menu structures in diabetes assistants

Demographic change in regard to an aging population with an increasing amount of diabetes patients will put a strain on health care rentability in all modern societies. Electronic living assistants for diabetes patients might help lift the burden on taxpayers, if they are usable for the heterogeneous user group. Research has shown that correct mental models of device menu structures might help users in handling electronic devices. This exploratory study investigates construction and facilitation of spatial mental models for a menu structure of a diabetes living assistant and relates them to performance in usage of a device. Furthemore impact of age, domain knowledge and technical expertise on complexity and quality of the mental model are evaluated. Results indicate that even having a simplified spatial representation of the menu structure increases navigation performance. Interestingly not the overall correctness of the model was important for task success but rather the amount of route knowledge within the model.

Recommender Systems for Health Informatics: State-of-the-Art and Future Perspectives

Recommender systems are a classical example for machine learning applications, however, they have not yet been used extensively in health informatics and medical scenarios. We argue that this is due to the specifics of benchmarking criteria in medical scenarios and the multitude of drastically differing end-user groups and the enormous context-complexity of the medical domain. Here both risk perceptions towards data security and privacy as well as trust in safe technical systems play a central and specific role, particularly in the clinical context. These aspects dominate acceptance of such systems. By using a Doctor-in-the-Loop approach some of these difficulties could be mitigated by combining both human expertise with computer efficiency. We provide a three-part research framework to access health recommender systems, suggesting to incorporate domain understanding, evaluation and specific methodology into the development process.

Reducing Complexity with Simplicity - Usability Methods for Industry 4.0

At RWTH Aachen University the research cluster “Production Technology for High-Wage Countries” engages in advancing the polylemma of production. In many cases engineers and physicists develop simulation tools, machine interfaces, and data exploration tools but lack essential training in HumanComputer Interaction. Without proper training the interaction of visual, cognitive and task complexity can lead to solutions that are valuable only to the developers themselves, but are not usable without extensive training. We show the most critical ergonomic factors for developing software in a scientific engineering setting that focuses on complex problems. We present an overview of usability methods as well as complexity reduction methods and their applicability in engineering software design. We present an exemplary study for the case of supply chain management, where the approaches were successfully integrated into a serious game not only serving as an investigatory tool but also as a training utility for supply chain managers.

The Impact of User Diversity on the Willingness to Disclose Personal Information in Social Network Services

Social media and social network sites (SNS) are a central medium for communication within the Internet. There has never been a faster possibility for information exchange across the globe with a comparable range and size of audience. So far, SNS are very popular in private communication. But can other fields of application profit from this role model? To find out more about the comparability of the two contexts (private and business) and to specify transferable design guidelines, we investigated the willingness to disclose private data in both private and business context, knowing that data disclosure is one significant success factor for SNS and communities. Therefore, an exploratory questionnaire study (N = 151) was designed. The focus of the study is based on the question whether there is a difference between the contexts and whether these differences are related to user diversity factors (age, gender, perceived locus of control over technology (PLoC), and personality traits according to Five Factor Model (FFM)). First results reveal that there is a significant difference between the two contexts that is hard to explain using only factors of user diversity.