Multilingual Framework for Risk Assessment and Symptom Tracking (MRAST).

The importance and value of real-world data in healthcare cannot be overstated because it offers a valuable source of insights into patient experiences. Traditional patient-reported experience and outcomes measures (PREMs/PROMs) often fall short in addressing the complexities of these experiences due to subjectivity and their inability to precisely target the questions asked. In contrast, diary recordings offer a promising solution. They can provide a comprehensive picture of psychological well-being, encompassing both psychological and physiological symptoms. This study explores how using advanced digital technologies, i.e., automatic speech recognition and natural language processing, can efficiently capture patient insights in oncology settings. We introduce the MRAST framework, a simplified way to collect, structure, and understand patient data using questionnaires and diary recordings. The framework was validated in a prospective study with 81 colorectal and 85 breast cancer survivors, of whom 37 were male and 129 were female. Overall, the patients evaluated the solution as well made; they found it easy to use and integrate into their daily routine. The majority (75.3%) of the cancer survivors participating in the study were willing to engage in health monitoring activities using digital wearable devices daily for an extended period. Throughout the study, there was a noticeable increase in the number of participants who perceived the system as having excellent usability. Despite some negative feedback, 44.44% of patients still rated the app's usability as above satisfactory (i.e., 7.9 on 1-10 scale) and the experience with diary recording as above satisfactory (i.e., 7.0 on 1-10 scale). Overall, these findings also underscore the significance of user testing and continuous improvement in enhancing the usability and user acceptance of solutions like the MRAST framework. Overall, the automated extraction of information from diaries represents a pivotal step toward a more patient-centered approach, where healthcare decisions are based on real-world experiences and tailored to individual needs. The potential usefulness of such data is enormous, as it enables better measurement of everyday experiences and opens new avenues for patient-centered care.

Scoping Review of Technological Solutions for Community Dwelling Older Adults and Implications for Instrumental Activities of Daily Living.

Aging in place is not without its challenges, with physical, psychological, social, and economic burdens on caregivers and seniors. To address these challenges and promote active aging, technological advancements offer a range of digital tools, applications, and devices, enabling community dwelling older adults to live independently and safely. Despite these opportunities, the acceptance of technology among the older adults remains low, often due to a mismatch between technology development and the actual needs and goals of seniors. The aim of this review is to identify recent technological solutions that monitor the health and well-being of aging adults, particularly within the context of instrumental activities of daily living (IADL). A scoping review identified 52 studies that meet specific inclusion criteria. The outcomes were classified based on social connectedness, autonomy, mental health, physical health, and safety. Our review revealed that a predominant majority (82%) of the studies were observational in design and primarily focused on health-related IADLs (59%) and communication-related IADLs (31%). Additionally, the study highlighted the crucial role of involving older adults in study design processes, with only 8 out of the 52 studies incorporating this approach. Our review also established the interview method as the most favoured technology evaluation tool for older adults' studies. The metrics of 'usability' and 'acceptance' emerged as the most frequently employed measures for technology assessment. This study contributes to the existing literature by shedding light on the implications of technological solutions for community dwelling older adults, emphasizing the types of technologies employed and their evaluation results.

Scoping Review on the Multimodal Classification of Depression and Experimental Study on Existing Multimodal Models.

Depression is a prevalent comorbidity in patients with severe physical disorders, such as cancer, stroke, and coronary diseases. Although it can significantly impact the course of the primary disease, the signs of depression are often underestimated and overlooked. The aim of this paper was to review algorithms for the automatic, uniform, and multimodal classification of signs of depression from human conversations and to evaluate their accuracy. For the scoping review, the PRISMA guidelines for scoping reviews were followed. In the scoping review, the search yielded 1095 papers, out of which 20 papers (8.26%) included more than two modalities, and 3 of those papers provided codes. Within the scope of this review, supported vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and long short-term memory network (LSTM; with gated and non-gated recurrent units) models, as well as different combinations of features, were identified as the most widely researched techniques. We tested the models using the DAIC-WOZ dataset (original training dataset) and using the SymptomMedia dataset to further assess their reliability and dependency on the nature of the training datasets. The best performance was obtained by the LSTM with gated recurrent units (F1-score of 0.64 for the DAIC-WOZ dataset). However, with a drop to an F1-score of 0.56 for the SymptomMedia dataset, the method also appears to be the most data-dependent.

Optimization of frequency lowering algorithms for getting the highest speech intelligibility improvement by hearing loss simulation.

High frequency hearing loss is a growing problem for both children and adults. To overcome this impairment, different frequency lowering methods (FLMs) were tried from 1930s, however no satisfaction was provided up to now. In this study, for getting higher speech intelligibility, eight combinations of FLMs which were designed originally were tried with simulated sounds onto normal hearing subjects. These improvements were calculated by the difference with standard hearing aid method, amplification. High frequency hearing loss was simulated with the combined suprathreshold effects. An offline study was carried out for each subject for determining the significant methods used in modified rhyme test (MRT) (Subjective measure for intelligibility). Significant methods were determined according to their speech intelligibility index (SII) (Objective measure for intelligibility). All different cases were tried under four noisy environments and a noise free environment. Twelve hearing impaired subjects were simulated by hearing loss simulation (HLS). MRT was developed for Turkish language as a first time. As the results of improvements, total 71 cases were statistically significant for twelve subjects. Eighty-three percent success of FLMs was achieved against amplification for being an alternative method of amplification in noisy environments. For four subjects, all significant methods gave higher improvements than amplification. As conclusion, specific method recommendations for different noisy environments were done for each subject for getting more speech intelligibility.

Preliminary results of a novel enhancement method for high-frequency hearing loss.

In this study, a software program was developed for high-frequency hearing loss subjects that includes a detailed audiogram and novel enhancement methods. The software performs enhancements of the audibility of high-frequency sounds according to the subject's detailed 31-point audiogram. This provides subject-specific gains in the entire frequency spectrum, and especially for high frequencies, of sounds. Amplification, compression, and transposition are the three main processing methods used to obtain the desired enhancements for the subjects. For low frequencies, only the amplification method was used according to the dB value of the input. For mid and high frequencies, the compression and transposition methods were used together. To obtain the preliminary results of the study, 10 subjects were enrolled in a detailed audiogram study for five weeks. In the study, environmental, music, and speech sounds were used. While the perceptual mean performances of the subjects were in the range of 25.33-63.77% in the first week, those values increased to 68.75-95.75% in the fifth week. In particular, all noisy and speech sounds were more significantly identified and understood by the subjects with the enhancement method (from 25.33% to 87.5% and from 42.33% to 90.5%, respectively). Three subjects had dropped out at the end of the study and small number of participants are the limitations of this study; however, as a preliminary result, some ideas can be inferred from the results for a smaller set of subjects obtained in the five weeks of the study. Thus, the reliability of the study needs to be tested with more subjects and a comparison with their own hearing aids should be conducted.

Multislice mapping and quantification of brain perfusion MR imaging data: a comparative study of homemade and commercial software.

PURPOSE: We developed a homemade computer program for analysis of perfusion weighted MR imaging (PW-MRI) data in order to produce colored multislice rCBV, rCBF, and MTT maps. We then compared those maps with others produced by a commercially available program, obtained from the same PW-MRI data, to determine the feasibility of using our program in clinical practice. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Studies of 20 patients were performed on a high field MR scanner. Imaging protocol consisted of perfusion study (EPI, TR/TE: 1430/46 msec, 10 mm gap, matrix: 128x128, FOV: 240 cm, NEX: 1). Twenty ml of Gd-DTPA was administered at a rate of 4-5 ml/sec beginning at the 5th acquisition of 50 dynamic series. MATLAB software was used for writing codes of both mathematical equations and the graphical user interface. All images were in DICOM standard. For validation of the results, all maps were compared with another commercially available program, which is widely being used in daily practice, and was installed on the MR scanner. Ability to define the lesion contours and extension, and artifacts at the bone-soft tissue interface were the criteria used for statistical evaluation. RESULTS: Field definition was equally good in 38% of the patient scans for both software programs; our homemade software was better in 23% of the cases and the commercial software was better in 31%. In 6% of the results, either software program was not sufficient. For the elimination of artifacts, our homemade software was 100% successful in every case. CONCLUSION: Our homemade program is a user friendly one that gives comparable results with those of a commonly used commercial one. However, this program should be tested with different categories of diseases and a larger patient population and then compared with different commercial software programs to be validated more clearly.