Thomas Wetter

Screening Internet forum participants for depression symptoms by assembling and enhancing multiple NLP methods

Depression is a disease that can dramatically lower quality of life. Symptoms of depression can range from temporary sadness to suicide. Embarrassment, shyness, and the stigma of depression are some of the factors preventing people from getting help for their problems. Contemporary social media technologies like Internet forums or micro-blogs give people the opportunity to talk about their feelings in a confidential anonymous environment. However, many participants in such networks may not recognize the severity of their depression and their need for professional help. Our approach is to develop a method that detects symptoms of depression in free text, such as posts in Internet forums, chat rooms and the like. This could help people appreciate the significance of their depression and realize they need to seek help. In this work Natural Language Processing methods are used to break the textual information into its grammatical units. Further analysis involves detection of depression symptoms and their frequency with the help of words known as indicators of depression and their synonyms. Finally, similar to common paper-based depression scales, e.g., the CES-D, that information is incorporated into a single depression score. In this evaluation study, our depressive mood detection system, DepreSD (Depression Symptom Detection), had an average precision of 0.84 (range 0.72-1.0 depending on the specific measure) and an average F measure of 0.79 (range 0.72-0.9).

A web-based system for clinical decision support and knowledge maintenance for deterioration monitoring of hemato-oncological patients

We introduce a web-based clinical decision support system (CDSS) and knowledge maintenance based on rules and a set covering method focusing on the problem of detecting serious comorbidities in hemato-oncological patients who are at high risk of developing serious infections and life threatening complications. We experienced that diagnostic problems which are characterized by fuzzy, uncertain knowledge and overlapping signs, still reveal some kind of patterns that can be transferred into a computer-based decision model. We applied a multi-stage evaluation process to assess the systems diagnostic performance. Depending on how system behavior was compared to presumably correct judgment of a case the correctness rate for closed cases with all data available varied between 58% and 71%, the overall rate after critical review was 84%. However, the real time behavior of our approach which data becoming available as time passes still has to be evaluated and observational studies need to be conducted.

How to approximate users' values while preserving privacy: experiences with using attitudes towards work tasks as proxies for personal value elicitation

Software users have different sets of personal values, such as benevolence, self-direction, and tradition. Among other factors, these personal values influence users’ emotions, preferences, motivations, and ways of performing tasks—and hence, information needs. Studies of user acceptance indicate that personal traits like values and related soft issues are important for the user’s approval of software. If a user’s dominant personal value were known, software could automatically show an interface variant which offers information and functionality that best matches his or her dominant value. A user’s dominant personal value is the one that most strongly influences his or her attitudes and behaviors. However, existing methods for measuring a user’s values are work intensive and/or interfere with the user’s privacy needs. If interface tailoring for very large groups of users is planned, value approximation has to be achieved on a large scale to assign individualized software to all users of the software. Our work focuses on approximating the dominant values of a user with less effort and less impact on privacy. Instead of probing for a user’s values directly, we explore the potential of approximating these values based on the user’s preferences for key tasks. Producing tailored versions of software is a separate topic not in the focus here. In this paper we rather describe a method to identify user values from task preferences and an empirical study of applying parts of this method. We are proposing the method in this paper for the first time except for a preliminary version orally presented at a workshop. The method consists of a research process and an application process. In the research process a researcher has to identify key tasks occurring in a context under investigation which have a relationship to personal values. These key tasks can be used in the application process to approximate the dominant values of new users in a similar context. In this empirical study we show that the research process of our method allows us to determine key tasks which approximate values in the shared context of nursing. The majority of the nurses were found to have one of the three following dominant values: benevolence, self-direction, or hedonism. Data confirmed common expectations: that nurses with the value of benevolence, when compared to all other nurses, had a higher preference for tasks which helped people immediately or improved their circumstances of the treatment. In relation to all other nurses, participants with self-direction disliked tasks which affected their personal freedom, and users with hedonism had a lower preference for tasks which involved physical work and preferred tasks which promised gratification. Our findings advance measurement of personal values in large user groups by asking questions with less privacy concern. However, the method requires substantial efforts during the initial research process to prepare such measurements. Future work includes replicating our method in other contexts and identifying value-dependent tasks for users with other values than the three values our empirical study mainly focused on.

Distinctive Features of Services Conveyed Through Mobile Apps

While mostly in this book carrier technology receives little attention, here are some important distinguishing features of smart-phone apps. Smart phones are perceived as light, easy, fun, versatile, ubiquitous, unlimited community, highly functional, in one word: convenient, not only by technology savvy.

Scrutinized Proof of Effectiveness or Cost Effectiveness Regarding Patient Reported Outcomes

To conquer an equal place next to classical treatments Consumer Health Informatics services have to master the equal challenge: an RCT. Statistically Consumer Health Informatics RCTs do not differ fundamentally from trials for new pharmaceuticals, including that non-inferiority or cost effectiveness may inform the study design. To be realistic and externally valid, however, trials must appreciate that (i) Consumer Health Informatics services must exist and develop in an environment that the experimenter cannot control and must still deploy a definite unmistakable intervention (ii) subjects are human beings whose cooperation we need but whose learning and reflections co-determine behavior and outcome and confound outcome measurement

Character of Domain and Organization of Book

This chapter mainly introduces the structure and purpose of the volume. Consumer Health Informatics involves methods and results from various disciplines: sciences, humanities, medicine, engineering, mainly ICT. Here Consumer Health Informatics is regarded as a set of services to enable the patient to safely play a more active role in his health care. The scientific literature is widely scattered. Consumer Health Informatics ranges from instantaneous advice seeking to lifelong coaching, from small chunks of information to deeply intrusive treatments. Methods to support this range, helpful devices, and how the added value and safety of services can be determined and assessed ethically are outlined. Alternative viewpoints are briefly introduced.

Partial Solutions for Patient Safety

The theme of Chap. 8 of how to identify and safeguard patient safety against client inherent risks is complemented here with selected concrete methods and resources. We walk through the four dimensions – medical, personality, cognition, identity/authentication – and analyze methods and resources in use or apparently appropriate for use. Some promising approaches in pulmology, genetics, mental conditions, weak personality, cognition-adapted information, etc. exist next to others where either assessment of risk level or management of an existent risk is not handled responsibly, e.g. follow-up upon spurious gene scans or limitations in probing for adverse attitudes. Finally data privacy and confidentiality principles and how the client is involved for their protection are briefly addressed.

Services for All Stages of the Metabolic Syndrome and Its Consequences

The metabolic syndrome and its clinical offsprings such as diabetes mellitus 2 affect hundreds of millions and generate tremendous health care workload. Lifestyle changes and consequent treatment have some potential to avoid or delay the disease progress, but are hard to maintain for a lifetime.

Economy 1: Immanent Mismatch Between Demand and Supply of Health Care Workforce

The demographic development in developed western countries entails a dramatic shortage of the health care workforce. Based on census and professional association provided data and projections the amount of this shortage is calculated for the USA and Germany. In best case scenarios we still come to conclusions that, to preserve the medical service level, we need a 30 % to 80 % larger health care workforce. Otherwise the number of Old agers served by one physician resp. nurse skyrockets within 10 to 15 years.Assumptions that enter the model are double checked exclusively coming to the conclusion that apparent easing factors turn out as time bombs or double edged.Of methods presented to match future supply and demand quality assurance, growth and diversification are promising. Consumer Health Informatics is introduced as diversification which can make use of trends in ICT and ease access to otherwise under-served population s.

Level 0: Searching – Finding – Trusting – Acting – Risking One’s Life?

The Internet and mobile apps have become so commonplace that using them to find health information and guidance is a natural consequence. Surveys confirm large and still rising figures of citizens actually searching and interpreting such information. Surveys also demonstrate alarming deficiencies: Irrational management of information Deceived self assessment of one’s competence Erroneous interpretation of found advice