Tag Archives: App

‘Eye-catching’ smartphone app could make it easy to screen for neurological disease at home —

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Researchers on the College of California San Diego have developed a smartphone app that might permit folks to display screen for Alzheimer’s illness, ADHD and different neurological ailments and problems — by recording closeups of their eye.

The app makes use of a near-infrared digicam, which is constructed into newer smartphones for facial recognition, together with an everyday selfie digicam to trace how an individual’s pupil adjustments in measurement. These pupil measurements could possibly be used to evaluate an individual’s cognitive situation.

The know-how is described in a paper that will probably be introduced on the ACM Laptop Human Interplay Convention on Human Components in Computing Programs (CHI 2022), which is able to happen from April 30 to Could 5 in New Orleans as a hybrid-onsite occasion.

“Whereas there’s nonetheless lots of work to be finished, I’m excited concerning the potential for utilizing this know-how to deliver neurological screening out of medical lab settings and into houses,” stated Colin Barry, {an electrical} and laptop engineering Ph.D. pupil at UC San Diego and the primary writer of the paper, which obtained an Honorable Point out for Finest Paper award. “We hope that this opens the door to novel explorations of utilizing smartphones to detect and monitor potential well being issues earlier on.”

Pupil measurement can present details about an individual’s neurological capabilities, current analysis has proven. For instance, pupil measurement will increase when an individual performs a troublesome cognitive process or hears an surprising sound.

Measuring the adjustments in pupil diameter is finished by performing what’s referred to as a pupil response take a look at. The take a look at may provide a easy and straightforward solution to diagnose and monitor varied neurological ailments and problems. Nonetheless, it at present requires specialised and dear tools, making it impractical to carry out exterior the lab or clinic.

Engineers within the Digital Well being Lab, led by UC San Diego electrical and laptop engineering professor Edward Wang, collaborated with researchers on the UC San Diego Middle for Psychological Well being Expertise (MHTech Middle) to develop a extra inexpensive and accessible resolution.

“A scalable smartphone evaluation software that can be utilized for large-scale group screenings may facilitate the event of pupil response checks as minimally-invasive and cheap checks to help within the detection and understanding of ailments like Alzheimer’s illness. This might have an enormous public well being affect,” stated Eric Granholm, a psychiatry professor at UC San Diego College of Drugs and director of the MHTech Middle.

The app developed by the UC San Diego crew makes use of a smartphone’s near-infrared digicam to detect an individual’s pupil. Within the near-infrared spectrum, the pupil may be simply differentiated from the iris, even in eyes with darker iris colours. This allows the app to calculate pupil measurement with sub-millimeter accuracy throughout varied eye colours. The app additionally makes use of a colour image taken by the smartphone’s selfie digicam to seize the stereoscopic distance between the smartphone and the consumer. The app then makes use of this distance to transform the pupil measurement from the near-infrared picture into millimeter items.

The app’s measurements have been akin to these taken by a tool referred to as a pupillometer, which is the gold commonplace for measuring pupil measurement.

The researchers additionally included varied options of their app to make it extra consumer pleasant for older adults.

“For us, probably the most vital elements in know-how growth is to make sure that these options are in the end usable for anybody. This consists of people like older adults who may not be accustomed to utilizing smartphones,” stated Barry.

The researchers labored with older grownup members to design a easy app interface that enables customers to self administer pupil response checks. This interface included voice instructions, image-based directions, and an affordable, plastic scope to direct the consumer to put their eye inside the view of the smartphone digicam.

“By testing immediately with older adults, we realized about methods to enhance our system’s general usability and even helped us innovate older grownup particular options that make it simpler for these with totally different bodily limits to nonetheless use our system efficiently,” stated Wang, who can also be a school member within the UC San Diego Design Lab. “When creating applied sciences, we should look past perform as the one metric of success, however perceive how our options will probably be utilized by end-users who’re very various.”

The Digital Well being Lab is constant this work in a mission to allow comparable pupillometry perform on any smartphone slightly than simply the newer smartphones. Future research will even contain working with older adults to guage house use of the know-how. The crew will work with older people with delicate cognitive impairment to check the app as a danger screening software for early stage Alzheimer’s illness.

This work was funded by the Nationwide Institute of Growing older.

Automated nutrition app can help people follow healthier diet —

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Folks may benefit from totally automated private dietary recommendation, as a brand new analysis paper exhibits that an app improved nutritious diet in medical trials.

A paper printed within the Journal of Medical Web Analysis right now (Mon 25 April 22) exhibits how the eNutri app developed by researchers in human diet and biomedical engineering on the College of Studying helped folks to eat extra healthily. Individuals who got automated personalised diet recommendation improved their nutritious diet rating by 6% in comparison with a management group who got normal wholesome consuming steerage.

Dr Roz Fallaize, Dietitian and Analysis Fellow on the College of Studying’s Division of Meals and Dietary Science stated:

“The analysis demonstrates that the eNutri know-how is efficient in serving to customers to enhance their wholesome meals consumption, with a big enchancment in eating regimen high quality for the group who had entry to automated, personalised diet recommendation.”

“Whereas having a registered nutritionist or dietitian giving personalised dietary recommendation is right, that is usually solely obtainable to these with well being issues or with the monetary useful resource to pay. There may be additionally rising curiosity in diet apps and internet providers, however many business apps are inclined to deal with weight reduction or calorie counting quite than wholesome consuming.”

“Dietary recommendation ought to at all times be targeted on wholesome, balanced diets and optimistic relationships with meals, and I am happy that our examine helped folks eat higher. One thrilling side of the eNutri system is the potential to supply it to a lot of folks at low-cost”

Dr Rodrigo Zenun Franco, a PhD graduate from the College of Studying and lead writer of the paper stated:

“The eNutri app prioritises wholesome consuming primarily based on proof and uniquely makes use of a eating regimen scoring system to offer food-based recommendation that’s tailor-made to the person person.”

“We’re persevering with to develop eNutri to go well with particular inhabitants teams together with these with coronary heart situations and hope to make this obtainable to the general public sooner or later”

Folks had been both assigned to obtain personalised diet recommendation or given normal wholesome consuming recommendation. These within the personalised group then had their diets scored based on 11 standards primarily based on UK dietary steerage. The eNutri app gave an automatic evaluation of eating regimen high quality giving the person a ‘nutritious diet rating’ out of 100.

The ‘nutritious diet rating’ consists of assessments of consumption of fruit, greens, wholegrains, purple and processed meat, with increased factors awarded when customers have the really useful consumption of those. The personalised recommendation is then focused to areas of their eating regimen which they might profit most from altering.

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New bird app spreads its wings —

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Researchers from The College of Queensland have helped design an app to guard birds susceptible to extinction the world over by breaking down language boundaries between scientists.

The Hen Language Range net app (https://translatesciences.shinyapps.io/bird_language_diversity/) will assist present a “birds eye view,” making certain very important info is shared to enhance worldwide conservation.

UQ’s Dr Pablo Negret stated the analysis crew analysed greater than 10,000 hen species, and located that 1587 species have 10 languages or extra spoken inside their distributions.

“Scientific info on species might be scattered throughout totally different languages, and worthwhile info can go lacking or get misplaced in translation,” Dr Negret stated.

“With out enough sharing of knowledge, this could compromise the effectiveness of conservation measures.

“Take the frequent pochard hen for instance; it’s categorised as weak and spans 108 international locations in Europe, Russia, Asia and north Africa, the place a complete of 75 official languages are spoken.

“The survival of the frequent pochard, and so many different species, relies on efficient collaboration and coverage agreements amongst folks with various linguistic and cultural backgrounds.”

“This app reveals the place threatened and migratory birds exist geographically, in relation to the language spoken in these areas,” Dr Negret stated.

“Merely choose a language to see the variety of hen species that dwell inside that language zone, or evaluate the affect of that language on hen species globally.

“We hope the app will incentivise researchers and conservation organisations to work together with their friends in different areas, particularly in the event that they communicate totally different languages, and be a place to begin to permit everybody to work collectively to guard threatened species.”

UQ researcher and co-author of paper, Dr Tatsuya Amano, stated this work might prolong additional than hen species.

“Any species, whether or not it is mammals, amphibians, or vegetation, with a variety spanning a number of international locations can be impacted by language boundaries, as will species that migrate throughout totally different international locations, akin to marine species and butterflies,” Dr Amano stated.

“The magnitude of the affect of poor communication on such an vital difficulty is obvious, which explains why we’re working onerous to enhance science communication throughout languages.”

Dr Amano stated optimistic steps had been taken in recent times to decrease the language barrier and facilitate improved science communication, however there was nonetheless room for enchancment.

“The scientific group is actually turning into higher at overcoming these boundaries, and plenty of tutorial journals have just lately modified their insurance policies to turn into extra language inclusive,” he stated.

“However the difficulty remains to be largely ignored, so we actually hope our most up-to-date work will shed extra mild on the significance of overcoming these boundaries to raised preserve life on Earth.”

This analysis is printed in PLOS ONE.

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Study showed that at-risk users who downloaded the app increased life-saving statin use —

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A Scripps Analysis staff developed a smartphone app that may calculate customers’ genetic threat for coronary artery illness (CAD) — and located that customers at excessive threat sought out acceptable medicine after utilizing the app.

Within the research, which seems in npj Digital Drugs in March 2022, the researchers detailed how their app known as MyGeneRank inputs collaborating people’ genetic data from the 23andMe genetic testing firm and outputs a CAD threat rating primarily based on the DNA information. Of the 721 individuals who supplied full data, these with high-risk scores have been more likely to begin utilizing statins or different cholesterol-lowering therapies, in comparison with these with low-risk scores.

“We noticed about twice the speed of statin initiation within the excessive genetic threat group vs the low genetic threat group, which signifies that methods like this might make an enormous contribution to public well being — coronary heart illness being the biggest reason behind dying globally,” says research senior writer Ali Torkamani, PhD, professor and director of Genomics and Genome Informatics on the Scripps Analysis Translational Institute.

In line with the U.S. Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, about 18 million American adults have CAD, the commonest type of coronary heart illness, which options the hardening and narrowing of arteries feeding the guts muscle. Greater than 300,000 Individuals die of ensuing coronary heart assaults yearly.

Statins reminiscent of atorvastatin and simvastatin, in addition to different, non-statin medication that cut back bloodstream ranges of ldl cholesterol and different fat-related molecules known as lipids, are actually extensively used, and have helped cut back the annual dying fee from CAD over the previous twenty years. However researchers estimate that within the US almost half of males and about 10 p.c of girls between 45 and 65 years outdated are not less than at intermediate threat of CAD — but solely a couple of third of those people take lipid-lowering medication.

Calculating CAD threat scores and speaking that data by way of smartphone apps is now being thought-about as a extremely scalable technique for nudging extra at-risk individuals to hunt medical recommendation and get lipid-lowering drugs when acceptable, thereby decreasing the incidence of CAD and heart-attacks.

“We now have the chance to combine an individual’s genetics into their cardiovascular well being evaluation to assist them higher perceive their individualized threat and empower them to make the mandatory modifications — together with the addition of statin remedy — to their threat issue optimization plans,” says first writer Evan Muse, MD, PhD, a heart specialist and lead for cardiovascular genomics on the Scripps Analysis Translational Institute.

“Even when somebody finds out they’ve low genetic threat for CAD, understanding their rating may also help — for instance if additionally they know they’ve excessive threat general, that will recommend different non-genetic elements like way of life are contributing to their threat and that they need to think about making adjustments,” Torkamani provides.

The staff is pioneering this app-based strategy. They developed a free CAD-risk iPhone app, in addition to an Android app. Customers can hyperlink their current 23andMe information and fill out consent kinds and health-related surveys, together with questions on the usage of lipid-lowering medication. The app can then calculate and share with the respondent a threat rating primarily based on the newest acknowledged genetic threat elements for CAD. The app then adopted up roughly a 12 months later with questions on the respondent’s present use of lipid-lowering drugs.

The researchers promoted the apps at scientific conferences, performed an promoting marketing campaign on Fb, and finally enrolled 3,800 eligible respondents, of whom 721 supplied sufficient preliminary and follow-up data for the evaluation.

The outcomes have been encouraging, based on the staff. A key discovering was that respondents who weren’t taking lipid decreasing medicine on the outset of the research, however have been knowledgeable by the app that they’d excessive gene-based threat scores for CAD, initiated lipid decreasing remedy at greater than twice the speed of these with low threat scores.

Total, research respondents within the high-risk class, in comparison with the low threat class, have been, at follow-up, about 1.4 instances extra more likely to report use of a statin lipid-lowering drug, and about 4 instances extra more likely to report use of a non-statin lipid-lowering drug. Respondents within the high-risk group additionally initiated lipid-lowering remedy a lot earlier, at age 52 on common, in comparison with 65 for the low-risk group.

“On the entire it seems to be like a big impact, particularly contemplating that we have been giving respondents solely appropriately contextualized details about their gene-based threat scores — we weren’t immediately telling them to exit and begin taking drugs,” Torkamani says.

He and his colleagues now plan to comply with up this pilot research with bigger and longer-term research of CAD risk-scoring apps — research that can embrace clinicians and can objectively document variations in cardiovascular well being outcomes reminiscent of coronary heart assaults.

Funding was supplied by the Stowers Household Basis and the Nationwide Institutes of Well being (UL1TR002550).