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Medicine is heading towards personalized care based on individual situations and conditions. With smartphones and increasingly miniaturized wearable devices, the sensors available on these devices can perform long-term continuous monitoring of several user health-related parameters, making them a powerful tool for a new medicine approach for these patients. Our proposed system, described in this article, aims to develop innovative solutions based on artificial intelligence techniques to empower patients with cardiovascular disease. These solutions will realize a novel 5P (Predictive, Preventive, Participatory, Personalized, and Precision) medicine approach by providing patients with personalized plans for treatment and increasing their ability for self-monitoring. Such capabilities will be derived by learning algorithms from physiological data and behavioral information, collected using wearables and smart devices worn by patients with health conditions. Further, developing an innovative system of smart algorithms will also focus on providing monitoring techniques, predicting extreme events, generating alarms with varying health parameters, and offering opportunities to maintain active engagement of patients in the healthcare process by promoting the adoption of healthy behaviors and well-being outcomes. The multiple features of this future system will increase the quality of life for cardiovascular diseases patients and provide seamless contact with a healthcare professional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Healthcare treatments might benefit from advances in artificial intelligence and technological equipment such as smartphones and smartwatches. The presence of cameras in these devices with increasingly robust and precise pattern recognition techniques can facilitate the estimation of the wound area and other telemedicine measurements. Currently, telemedicine is vital to the maintenance of the quality of the treatments remotely. This study proposes a method for measuring the wound area with mobile devices. The proposed approach relies on a multi-step process consisting of image capture, conversion to grayscale, blurring, application of a threshold with segmentation, identification of the wound part, dilation and erosion of the detected wound section, identification of accurate data related to the image, and measurement of the wound area. The proposed method was implemented with the OpenCV framework. Thus, it is a solution for healthcare systems by which to investigate and treat people with skin-related diseases. The proof-of-concept was performed with a static dataset of camera images on a desktop computer. After we validated the approach's feasibility, we implemented the method in a mobile application that allows for communication between patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educating teenagers about nutrition and promoting active lifestyles is essential in reducing the long-term health risks and one idea to achieve this is by using mobile applications. Previous studies showed that the existing mobile applications have similar functionalities, such as intervention with questionnaires, and the use of gamification techniques to improve interactiveness. However, unlike our study, some studies are not validated and verified by healthcare professionals. Additionally, this study intends to promote the interaction between the teenagers and the medical communities. In this study, we analyze the benefits of the proposed mobile application, which features monitoring of physical activity, daily tips and curiosities, questionnaires, and gamification through earning points. Most of the teenagers were satisfied with the physical activity monitoring and found the tips, curiosities, and weekly questionnaires useful. The study started with 26 teenagers from two schools in the center of Portugal that would use the mobile application for five weeks. Still, at the end of the study, only 7 teenagers finalized the study. The decreasing number of teenagers in the study was affected by the lack of social interaction caused by the pandemic situation. During the period, the mobile application would engage the users with notifications on nutrition and physical activity, challenges concerning the number of steps and calories they would have to spend, and questionnaires related to the curiosities and suggestions from the previous week. We used Fisher's test to investigate the relationship between the assessment obtained in the responses to the questionnaires, and the adoption of healthier eating and sports practices. In summary, participants were satisfied with the mobile application and experienced some improvements in diet and habits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile health applications are applied for different purposes. Healthcare professionals and other users can use this type of mobile applications for specific tasks, such as diagnosis, information, prevention, treatment, and communication. This paper presents an analysis of mobile health applications used by healthcare professionals and their patients. A secondary objective of this article is to evaluate the scientific validation of these mobile health applications and to verify if the results provided by these applications have an underlying sound scientific foundation. This study also analyzed literature references and the use of mobile health applications available in online application stores. In general, a large part of these mobile health applications provides information about scientific validation. However, some mobile health applications are not validated. Therefore, the main contribution of this paper is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the usability and user-perceived quality of mobile health applications and the challenges related to scientific validation of these mobile applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]