Background

Help4Mood is acceptable to some patients receiving treatment for depression although none used it as regularly as intended. Changes in depression symptoms in individuals who used the system regularly reached potentially meaningful levels.

How predictable are life trajectories? We investigated this question with a scientific mass collaboration using the common task method; 160 teams built predictive models for six life outcomes using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a high-quality birth cohort study. Despite using a rich dataset and applying machine-learning methods optimized for prediction, the best predictions were not very accurate and were only slightly better than those from a simple benchmark model. Within each outcome, prediction error was strongly associated with the family being predicted and weakly associated with the technique used to generate the prediction. Overall, these results suggest practical limits to the predictability of life outcomes in some settings and illustrate the value of mass collaborations in the social sciences.

While there has been a lot of research on the usability of reminders and alarms in the work context, the home has been somewhat neglected despite the importance of reminder systems for telecare and assistive living systems. We conducted a comprehensive mixed-methods study into the requirements for useable and acceptable reminders in the home. The study consisted of a questionnaire (N=379), 6 focus groups, and 7 home tour interviews. Our results highlight the need for highly flexible and contextualized multimodal and multi-device reminder solutions that build on existing successful strategies for remembering in and around the home. We suggest that developers of home care reminder systems should design for diversity,

No abstract