Social Mobile Gaming Boosts Rehabilitation for Physically Impaired Patients
The researchers from Imperial have designed a video game called Balloon Buddies, which is a tool that enables those recovering from conditions such as a stroke to engage and play together with healthy volunteers such as therapists and family members as a form of rehabilitation. Balloon Buddies is designed to level the playing field by allowing healthy participants to support the less abled player.
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Mental Health Mobile Apps Are Effective Self-Help Tools
When it comes to strengthening your mental or emotional health, would you trust an app? A trio of Brigham Young University health science researchers has published new research that says the answer is yes. The group was looking to identify what it is about health apps that influences users' behavior. Over three studies, they surveyed roughly 600 people who had used diet, physical activity or mental health apps in the past six months.
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Using Social Media Big Data to Combat Prescription Drug Crisis
Researchers at Dartmouth, Stanford University, and IBM Research, conducted a critical review of existing literature to determine whether social media big data can be used to understand communication and behavioral patterns related to prescription drug abuse. Their study found that with proper research methods and attention to privacy and ethical issues, social media big data can reveal important information concerning drug abuse, such as user-reported side effects, drug cravings, emotional states, and risky behaviors.
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Can Virtual Reality be Used to Manage Pain at a Pediatric Hospital?
Virtual reality has emerged into popular culture with an ever-widening array of applications including clinical use in a pediatric healthcare center. Children undergo necessary yet painful and distressing medical procedures every day, but very few non-pharmaceutical interventions have been found to successfully manage the pain and anxiety associated with these procedures.
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Giving Rookie Dads the Online Info they Really Need
Expectant and new parents often turn to the internet for parenting prep, but it turns out that dads often don't seem to find the information they say they need about pregnancy, parenthood and routes to their own mental health and well-being. Now, a new study from a Canadian team led by the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) with funding from global men's health charity the Movember Foundation highlights just what soon-to-be and new fathers want to see in a dad-focused website and how best to meet those needs.
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Free iPhone App could Guide MS Research, Treatment
For some diseases, a simple blood test is all that's needed to estimate severity or confirm a diagnosis. Not so for multiple sclerosis. No single lab test can tell doctors what type of MS a patient has, nor whether it's responding to treatment. But by better tracking patients' symptoms and potential triggers with help from a new iPhone app,
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Social Media Data Use Needs Tighter Research Controls
Information shared on social media is being regularly used in research projects without users' consent, a study suggests. Experts have called for tighter control of the practice, with fresh guidelines needed to ensure personal data is being used appropriately. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh say ethics frameworks around consent, privacy and ownership for such studies are not keeping pace with technological developments.
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