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Mobile phone-based human activity recognition (HAR) consists of inferring user’s activity type from the analysis of the inertial mobile sensor data. This paper aims to mainly introduce a new classification approach called adaptive k-nearest neighbors (AKNN) for intelligent HAR using smartphone inertial sensors with a potential real-time implementation on smartphone platform.

The proposed method puts forward several modification on AKNN baseline by using kernel discriminant analysis for feature reduction and hybridizing weighted support vector machines and KNN to tackle imbalanced class data set.

Extensive experiments on a five large scale daily activity recognition data set have been performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method in terms of error rate, recall, precision, F1-score and computational/memory resources, with several comparison with state-of-the art methods and other hybridization modes. The results showed that the proposed method can achieve more than 50% improvement in error rate metric and up to 5.6% in F1-score. The training phase is also shown to be reduced by a factor of six compared to baseline, which provides solid assets for smartphone implementation.

This work builds a bridge to already growing work in machine learning related to learning with small data set. Besides, the availability of systems that are able to perform on flight activity recognition on smartphone will have a significant impact in the field of pervasive health care, supporting a variety of practical applications such as elderly care, ambient assisted living and remote monitoring.

The purpose of this study is to build and test an accurate offline model by using only a compact training data that can reduce the computational and memory complexity of the system. This provides grounds for developing new innovative hybridization modes in the context of daily activity recognition and smartphone-based implementation. This study demonstrates that the new AKNN is able to classify the data without any training step because it does not use any model for fitting and only uses memory resources to store the corresponding support vectors.

Children living in agricultural areas are exposed to pesticides in their living areas and through activities of daily living. These exposures may lead to adverse health effects. The purpose of this paper is to investigate household environmental and behavioural factors associated with chlorpyrifos exposure and resultant adverse health effects in children living in an agricultural community.

A cross-sectional study was conducted including 65 toddlers (age of 12–36 months) and their parents were face-to-face interviewed from January to February 2016. Toddler’s hands and feet, toys and floors were wiped for chlorpyrifos residue analysis. The wipes were extracted and analysed by gas chromatography with a flame photometric detector, and blood cholinesterase activity was measured by the EQM Test-mate (model 400).

The average age (± standard deviation) of children was 19.9 (±5.9) months. Chlorpyrifos detections were 61.5 per cent (hands), 57.1 per cent (toys), 53.8 per cent (floors) and 30.8 per cent (feet). The highest chlorpyrifos residue concentration was detected on toy surface (3.022 µg/m²). Chlorpyrifos residues on hands and feet were positively correlated with concentrations on floors and toys (Spearman’s ρ, p<0.01). Multiple linear regression analysis revealed that more frequent hand washing (β=−0.236, p=0.067) and showering (β=−0.240, p=0.056) was negatively associated with chlorpyrifos residue on children’s body. House cleaning frequency was significantly associated with an increase in haemoglobin-adjusted erythrocyte cholinesterase (β=0.251, p<0.05).

Chlorpyrifos exposures found in the children household area through their activities and behaviours can cause several adverse health effects. The circumstances associated with chlorpyrifos exposure should be mitigated and reduced to improve the household environment of children living agricultural areas.

Dementia is a complex, progressively degenerative condition. It results in loss of cognitive and functional capabilities, along with a significant increase in the level of dependency. A reduction in the use of pharmacological interventions correlates with an increased in good quality non-pharmacological interventions in dementia care. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of 14-session face-to-face cognitive stimulation therapy (CST) and Sonas group interventions on individuals living with dementia with moderate cognitive impairment, from pre-intervention to post-intervention in terms of their cognition, communication, neuropsychiatric symptoms, activities of daily living and quality of life.

A pilot single blind prospective controlled trial evaluated two group intervention approaches, cognitive stimulation therapy (CST) and Sonas, with 28 participants with moderate dementia. Pseudorandomisation and single blinding were implemented. CST has a solid evidence base. Sonas is a widely used multi-sensory intervention in Ireland with an emerging evidence base. Participants were recruited from a mental health service. Participants who had a formal diagnosis of dementia, moderate cognitive impairment and some ability to communicate and understand communication were included.

Results supported CST to a greater extent than Sonas. The CST group showed significant changes in cognition (p = 0.032) and communication (p = 0.006). Both groups had significant changes in carer quality of life (CST, p = 0.019; Sonas, p = 0.035). Results support the recommendations for a future definitive trial.

Rehabilitation potential of individuals living with moderate dementia was demonstrated. This study suggests that group interventions like these impact on the trajectory of dementia.

Rehabilitation interventions impact on the trajectory of dementia. CST and Sonas have no impact on activities of daily living. Future studies with larger sample sizes, 16 weeks intervention period and control groups are required.

This pilot study supports CST over Sonas interventions for individuals living with moderate dementia. Multiple outcome measures demonstrated trends towards significance for both interventions. Future definitive trials may detect a significant effect of both interventions.

A dementia diagnosis is devastating and generally creates negative perceptions and associations (Alvira, 2014). In contrast, the outcomes of this study are positive. This study provides evidence that occupational therapist intervention can impact on the trajectory of the condition with people with dementia demonstrating that they do have rehabilitation potential by responding to treatment and improving and maintaining their abilities as they progress through the condition.

Assistive technology (AT) has been highlighted as a tool that can support self-management for people living with schizophrenia. A gap in the literature exists regarding the views held by the stakeholders involved in the health care of an individual living with schizophrenia regarding the potential use of AT to enable the self-management of this condition. The purpose of this paper is to explore how individuals living with schizophrenia, their relatives and their mental health care professionals view AT as a tool to facilitate self-management.

This mixed methods research paper will discuss the findings of the second stage of a two-stage research study. The paper will discuss the findings of questionnaires that were disseminated to service users living with schizophrenia, their relatives and the health-care professionals of a community mental health service in the Greater Dublin area.

The results indicate that the introduction of AT for the self-management of schizophrenia would be accepted by key stakeholders.

As AT continues to develop, it is clear from the findings presented in this paper that the main stakeholder groups involved in the care of an individual living with schizophrenia are amenable to the use of AT to facilitate the self-management of this condition. Further research is required to explore correct policing and management of its implementation.

This study is the first study of its kind within an Irish context to explore the use of assistive technology as a tool for self-management from the perspective of those experiencing schizophrenia, their relatives and the health-care professionals working alongside them.

Poor medication adherence leads to high hospital admission rate and heavy amount of health-care cost. To cope with this problem, various electronic pillboxes have been proposed to improve the medication adherence rate. However, most of the existing electronic pillboxes use time-based reminders which may often lead to ineffective reminding if the reminders are triggered at inopportune moments, e.g. user is sleeping or eating.

In this paper, the authors propose an AI-empowered context-aware smart pillbox system. The pillbox system collects real-time sensor data from a smart home environment and analyzes the user’s contextual information through a computational abstract argumentation-based activity classifier.

Based on user’s different contextual states, the smart pillbox will generate reminders at appropriate time and on appropriate devices.

This paper presents a novel context-aware smart pillbox system that uses argumentation-based activity recognition and reminder generation.

The paper aims to investigate if the performance of older adults on the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) were associated or predictive of their functional performance in a geriatric evaluation and management (GEM) inpatient hospital setting. This will inform the occupational therapy assessment and management of older adults admitted to sub-acute GEM settings.

In all, 20 participants (11 men, 9 women, mean age 82 years, SD = 6.93) were recruited from a GEM ward in an Australian hospital. Participants’ cognitive abilities were assessed using the MMSE and MoCA, and their functional performance were assessed using the Functional Independence Measure (FIM). Spearman’s rho correlations and linear regression analyses were completed. Bootstrapping was applied to the regression analyses to accommodate the small study sample size.

No statistically significant correlations were obtained between the total and subscale scores of the MMSE and FIM or between the total and subscale scores of the MoCA and FIM. In other words, the cognitive and functional abilities of older adults admitted to a GEM setting were not significantly associated in this study.

The findings suggest that the MoCA and the MMSE were not predictive of participants’ functional performance as measure by the FIM in a sub-acute GEM setting. Occupational therapists should be cautious when interpreting participants’ MMSE, MoCA and FIM results and not depend solely on these results in the goal setting and intervention planning processes for clients on GEM wards. Further studies are recommended to confirm these findings.

This study aims to co-develop a Frailty, Health and Care Needs Assessment (FHCNA) questionnaire for people experiencing homelessness and explore the feasibility of its use by non-clinical staff in homeless hostels.

The FHCNA, aimed at identifying frailty and other health and care priorities for people experiencing homelessness, was co-designed in workshops (online and in person) with homelessness and inclusion health staff. Its feasibility was tested by staff and their clients in two hostels, with pre- and post-study focus groups held with hostel staff to gain input and feedback.

The FHCNA was co-developed and then used to collect 74 pairs of resident and key worker inputted data (62% of eligible hostel residents). The mean age of clients was 48 years (range 22–82 years). High levels of unmet need were identified. Over half (53%) were identified as frail. Common concerns included difficulty walking (46%), frequent falls (43%), chronic pain (36%), mental health issues (57%) and dental concerns (50%). In total, 59% of clients reported difficulty in performing at least one basic activity of daily living, while only 14% had undergone a Care Act Assessment. Hostel staff found using the FHCNA to be feasible, acceptable and potentially useful in facilitating explorations of met and unmet health and social care needs of hostel clients. By identifying unmet needs, the FHCNA has the potential to support staff to advocate for access to health and social care support.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to co-develop and feasibility test a questionnaire for use by non-clinically trained staff to identify frailty and other health and care needs of people experiencing homelessness in a hostel setting.