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Digital Health Innovations for Caregivers of People with Chronic Conditions
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Digital Health Innovations for Caregivers of People with Chronic Conditions

A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Health Care Sciences & Services".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2023) | Viewed by 3215

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Kieren Egan

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow G1 1XQ, UK
Interests: digital health; co-design; dementia; caregivers; post diagnostic pathways; evidence based intervention design; public health
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Our aging global population, health and social care workforce shortages, and recent experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted once more the reliance of our societies worldwide on caregivers. These dependencies include both “informal” caregivers (e.g., friends and family) and professional caregivers (e.g., nurses, doctors, social workers). 

The challenges that caregivers face on a day-to-day basis are considerable. The reality is that many do not stay physically or mentally well, and there can be little accessible support on offer. This results in caregivers facing lower quality of life, increased burden, and reduced opportunities to enjoy work and activities for wellbeing. Many of those who receive care on a regular basis face a complex array of health problems, including chronic conditions such as cognitive decline and dementia. An aging population will mean that many chronic conditions such as dementia will continue to become more commonplace. There is a need to learn more about how to best support the health and wellbeing of caregivers, including through the lens of digital solutions.

This Special Issue is focused on all types of digital solutions (e.g., smartphone applications, virtual reality, data-driven approaches) that offer learnings on how to support the indispensable caregiver population that supports those with chronic conditions. 

Some examples of topics that could be covered include:

  • Novel/innovative ways of engaging or “co-creating” with caregivers to produce higher-quality digital innovations aimed at improving wellbeing in caregivers;
  • Digital innovations designed to support “informal” caregivers to improve overall wellbeing/quality of life, including within the community setting;
  • Digital innovations used/tested in the care home/nursing home sector to support professional caregivers’ wellbeing;
  • Digital innovations designed for remote monitoring and support;
  • Data-driven approaches to understand and support professional and/or informal carers;
  • Digital innovations that can help family members and friends of individuals who experience side effects of treatments and/or medications.

Dr. Kieren Egan
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • brain health
  • cognitive decline
  • co-design
  • digital health
  • caregivers
  • long-term conditions
  • chronic conditions

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 1483 KiB  
Article
Stress Response Analysis via Dynamic Entropy in EEG: Caregivers in View
by Ricardo Zavala-Yoé, Hafiz M. N. Iqbal, Roberto Parra-Saldívar and Ricardo A. Ramírez-Mendoza
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023, 20(10), 5913; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20105913 - 22 May 2023
Viewed by 1286
Abstract
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), stress can be defined as any type of alteration that causes physical, emotional, or psychological tension. A very important concept that is sometimes confused with stress is anxiety. The difference between stress and anxiety is that [...] Read more.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), stress can be defined as any type of alteration that causes physical, emotional, or psychological tension. A very important concept that is sometimes confused with stress is anxiety. The difference between stress and anxiety is that stress usually has an existing cause. Once that activator has passed, stress typically eases. In this respect, according to the American Psychiatric Association, anxiety is a normal response to stress and can even be advantageous in some circumstances. By contrast, anxiety disorders differ from temporary feelings of anxiousness or nervousness with more intense feelings of fear or anxiety. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) explicitly describes anxiety as exorbitant concern and fearful expectations, occurring on most days for at least 6 months, about a series of events. Stress can be measured by some standardized questionnaires; however, these resources are characterized by some major disadvantages, the main one being the time consumed to interpret them; i.e., qualitative information must be transformed to quantitative data. Conversely, a physiological recourse has the advantage that it provides quantitative spatiotemporal information directly from brain areas and it processes data faster than qualitative supplies. A typical option for this is an electroencephalographic record (EEG). We propose, as a novelty, the application of time series (TS) entropies developed by us to inspect collections of EEGs obtained during stress situations. We investigated this database related to 23 persons, with 1920 samples (15 s) captured in 14 channels for 12 stressful events. Our parameters reflected that out of 12 events, event 2 (Family/financial instability/maltreatment) and 10 (Fear of disease and missing an important event) created more tension than the others. In addition, the most active lobes reflected by the EEG channels were frontal and temporal. The former is in charge of performing higher functions, self-control, self monitoring, and the latter is in charge of auditory processing, but also emotional handling. Thus, events E2 and E10 triggering frontal and temporal channels revealed the actual state of participants under stressful situations. The coefficient of variation revealed that E7 (Fear of getting cheated/losing someone) and E11 (Fear of suffering a serious illness) were the events with more changes among participants. In the same sense, AF4, FC5, and F7 (mainly frontal lobe channels) were the most irregular on average for all participants. In summary, by means of dynamic entropy analysis, the goal is to process the EEG dataset in order to elucidate which event and brain regions are key for all participants. The latter will allow us to easily determine which was the most stressful and on which brain zone. This study can be applied to other caregivers datasets. All this is a novelty. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Health Innovations for Caregivers of People with Chronic Conditions)
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18 pages, 1747 KiB  
Article
Supporting Physical Activity for Informal Caregivers during and beyond COVID-19: Exploring the Feasibility, Usability and Acceptability of a Digital Health Smartphone Application, ‘CareFit’
by Kieren J. Egan, William Hodgson, Gennaro Imperatore, Mark D. Dunlop, Roma Maguire and Alison Kirk
Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(19), 12506; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191912506 - 30 Sep 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1363
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed how our global societies rely upon the care and support of informal (unpaid) caregivers: in the UK alone, there are an estimated 6.5 million informal carers. The caring role is not just precarious, it is often associated with [...] Read more.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed how our global societies rely upon the care and support of informal (unpaid) caregivers: in the UK alone, there are an estimated 6.5 million informal carers. The caring role is not just precarious, it is often associated with high levels of stress, poor/deteriorating health and crisis points (hospitalisations, worsening of health). Fittingly, there has been much research in recent years focusing on mental health supports. A lesser explored area is physical health and physical activity. To address this, we conducted a real-world feasibility, usability and acceptability study of a novel codesigned digital health app for caregivers to improve levels of physical activity. Our study was designed to test the prototype app use for three weeks, following participants across questionnaires/in app data/qualitative data. Our findings (from 27 caregivers) highlights key knowledge gaps around physical activity—national guidelines were not reaching populations studies and behavioural change techniques hold promise to help support caregivers in the longer term. Our collective results support the acceptability, usability and feasibility of the Carefit app and warrant further investigation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Digital Health Innovations for Caregivers of People with Chronic Conditions)
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