Category: Wearables

New Article: Individualized Modeling to Distinguish Between High and Low Arousal States Using Physiological Data

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Two timestreams, warped to common timing

As Wear-IT begins to take shape in more detail, we’ve been looking at new ways to understand and model physiological data on an individual level. Recent work with Ame Osotsi, Zita Oravecz, and Joshua Smyth examines individual differences in physiological response in a paper called Individualized Modeling to Distinguish Between High and Low Arousal States Using Physiological Data, just published in the Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research.
In it, we illustrate the importance of individual modeling for physiological states, showing that high-arousal states have physiological signatures that can be detected by machine learners, but that those signatures differ enormously from person to person, and individualized modeling is really important.

Society for Ambulatory Assessment (SAA2019)

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Dr. Brick presented at the Society for Ambulatory Assessment’s 2019 meeting in Syracuse, New York.  The SAA is dedicated to examining the applications and uses of tools like Wear-IT to clinical and research settings.  As always, a phenomenal set of scientists were there.  Penn State’s College of Health and Human Development was there in force, with a number of great presentations.

Dr. Brick presented in-process work using new statistical and data mining methods focused on real-time feature selection.  The idea is that smartphone surveys are annoying, and the longer they are the more annoying they are.  Annoyance leads to people ignoring the surveys, which means less data and more participant costs (e.g. money, energy, burnout).  The goal of this new work is to make in-the-moment decisions about which questions to ask and how to ask them, in order to minimize the burden on the participants and maximize the amount of data gathered.

CCSA Conference 2019

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Penn State’s Consortium to Combat Substance Abuse (CCSA) had its first annual conference today.  Members of the RTS lab presented a poster there focused on trying to define and understand the process of recovery at a basic level.

One primary focus of the poster was aimed at understanding something called recovery capital.  The idea is pretty straightforward: these are the characteristics of a person, their holdings, and their environment and community that provide support that improves recovery.  One form of recovery capital is traditional capital: if you’ve got the financial resources to be able to, for example, take 90 days off of work to go to a rehab facility, that is one characteristic that can help with your recovery.  But it goes a lot further than that.  Supportive relationships, community support, and a whole suite of other characteristics can contribute to recovery.

There are a wide array of paths to recovery.  One of them that takes advantage of some of these aspects of recovery capital uses recovery communities to provide a variety of these different levels of support, and one application of the Wear-IT project is looking at communities like these and trying to understand what characteristics of these communities make them most effective.

The CCSA conference has turned out to be an amazing event that’s building some great connections.  I’m very much looking forward to how this group advances.  The conference really showed that Penn State, with its ties to prevention, outreach, treatment, and legislature across Commonwealth, really has the potential to have a tremendous impact.

Recovery Science Research Collaborative

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The Recovery Science Research Collaborative had its annual meeting at Penn State this week.  Great scientific discussion around the way to understand recovery.  The group combines qualitative researchers, clinicians, recovery specialists, and a few quantitative folks.  Lots of great discussion around frameworks and metatheories of recovery, the emergence of recovery science as an interdisciplinary junction of biology, psychology, sociology and medicine–combining the health, behavioral, and social sciences all at once.  Dr. Brick spoke about Wear-IT and EMA+Wearables approaches to modeling and intervening in the process of recovery to improve well being.