Researchers Uncover Security Issues with Health Apps for Dementia Patients
Use caution when entering personal health information into a convenient app on your mobile device, because not all apps are created equal when it comes to protecting your privacy, warns McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School clinicians. In a recent paper, a team of McLean Hospital researchers reported that many health apps designed to assist dementia patients and their caregivers have inadequate security policies or lack security policies altogether.
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Using Machine Learning to Improve Patient Care
Doctors are often deluged by signals from charts, test results, and other metrics to keep track of. It can be difficult to integrate and monitor all of these data for multiple patients while making real-time treatment decisions, especially when data is documented inconsistently across hospitals. In a new pair of papers, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) explore ways for computers to help doctors make better medical decisions.
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Smartphone App may Help Older Adults Manage Serious Mental Illness and Chronic Health Conditions
The use of new technologies in geriatric psychiatry shows promise for advancing personalized medicine and improving patient care. A new study in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry describes the successful adaptation of an integrated medical and psychiatric self-management intervention to a smartphone application for middle-aged and older adults with serious mental illness.
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New Noninvasive Method of Intracranial Pressure Monitoring
Researchers from Klinikum Stuttgart and the University of Erlangen, Germany, report preliminary findings that show a noninvasive method of monitoring intracranial pressure (ICP) that could rival the gold standards of invasive intraventricular and intraparenchymal monitoring. To date no noninvasive method of ICP monitoring has proved adequate to replace invasive ones. The new noninvasive monitoring device uses advanced signal analysis algorithms to evaluate properties of acoustic signals that pass through the brain in order to determine ICP values.
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Improving Students' Academic Performance - There's an App for That
A mobile learning app that uses game elements such as leaderboards and digital badges may have positive effects on student academic performance, engagement, and retention, according to a study published in the open access International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education. Researchers at Swinburne University of Technology, Australia developed a fully customizable app that allowed lecturers to push quizzes based on course content directly to their students' devices in order to motivate them, increase their competitiveness, and keep them engaged with the course.
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Designing Soft Robots: Ethics-Based Guidelines for Human-Robot Interactions
Soft-bodied robots offer the possibility for social engagement, and novel tactile human-robot interactions that require careful consideration of the potential for misplaced emotional attachments and personally and socially destructive behavior by users. The ethical challenges related to human-robot interactions and how these should contribute to soft robotics design in the context of social interaction are discussed in a compelling new article in Soft Robotics, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers.
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Google Searches can be Used to Track Dengue in Underdeveloped Countries
An analytical tool that combines Google search data with government-provided clinical data can quickly and accurately track dengue fever in less-developed countries, according to new research published in PLOS Computational Biology by Shihao Yang of Harvard University and colleagues. The research builds on a methodology previously developed by the team to track influenza in the United States.
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