Congratulations Ning!

Congratulations to Ning Xia on the successful defense of his Master's Thesis, "HealthyLifeHRA: Web Application" in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science!


The abstract of his thesis is pasted below.

Abstract

A health risk assessment (HRA) system is an important tool for helping people
realize what lifestyle changes they should have in order to live a healthier and
longer life, and what benefits they can have by doing the right things. In this thesis,
we discuss the design and implementation of various components of the web-based
version of a health risk assessment system, called the HealthyLifeHRA system, which
is being developed by a multi-institutional team of researchers.

The HealthyLifeHRA system allows a user to take a questionnaire, and produces a visualized report with statistics, messages, pictures, and bar charts about the user’s health status, that highlights potential mortality risks of the participant. Questions in the questionnaire include basic demographic information, epidemiologic data, and life-style information. This tool can be used by health care providers to communicate with patients on their health status. And individual users can use it to become aware of their health situation, and, perhaps, take early measures to deal with various higher-level mortality risks in their lifestyles.

The HealthyLifeHRA family consists of a website version, a standalone version, an iPad version and an Android tablet version. Web-based version of the HealthyLifeHRA family takes advantage of various computing and web technologies, and provides multiple HRA client systems for use in primary care clinical settings. The web-based version includes a client-side interface library, a client-side report generation library and a server-side risk computation engine.

Congratulations Umang!

Congratulations to Umang Banguria on the successful defense of his Master's Thesis, "HealthyLifeiPad Health Risk Assessment System for iPads " in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science!

The abstract of his thesis is pasted below.

ABSTRACT
Over half of all deaths before the age of 65 can be attributed to lifestyle factors. In order to reduce the frequency of these lifestyle-related deaths, it is important to understand how lifestyle factors contribute to a person’s health risks and how these factors can be modified to reduce these risks. A health risk assessment (HRA) is an information tool that determines the impact a person’s lifestyle factors and current health status have on their probability of dying from specific diseases over a defined period of time. This thesis describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of an HRA application for iPads, HealthyLifeiPad.

The HealthyLifeiPad application prompts the user with a list of questions related to their health and lifestyle, and calculates, based on user’s responses, the risk factors for 43 different causes of death. Bases on these risk values, a report is generated providing visualizations of the user’s computed risks as well as personalized recommendations to improve their health. These reports can also serve a useful tool for healthcare providers to assess their patient’s health risks and provide advice.

The iPad application will be able to function on its own as a stand-alone application, as well as be integrated with the web and Android clients in the HealthyLife suite of applications. The stand-alone functionality allows for a user to take the questionnaire, generate a report, and email a PDF version of the report. In addition to this functionality, the integrated version allows users to create and log into their accounts where their questionnaire responses can be stored and later accessed by the user or their provider through the web HealthyLife client.

Congratulations Can!

Congratulations to Can Tuzla on the successful defense of his Master's Project, "HealthyLife Android: Health Risk Assessment System for Android Tablets."
in the CWRU Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science!

HealthyLife^Android Health Risk Assessment System for Android Tablets

by

Can Tuzla

This project presents the design, implementation and evaluation of an HRA application for Android tablets, called HealthyLife^Android.

HealthyLife^Android questionnaire presents the user a list of questions, calculates, based on the answers, user’s risk factors for 43 different causes of death, and produces a detailed report that provides a multitude of statistics and advice tailored to the user.  HealthyLife^Android is a convenient tool for healthcare professionals to assess their patients’ risk of death, and to provide advice. 

This project presents two versions of HealthyLife^Android application, namely, a stand-alone version, and a web-version. For the implementation, three external Android libraries are used, namely, AndroidPlot, org.json, and iText. And, the risk computation engine for HealthyLife, the web-browser version of HealthyLife^Android, is rewritten from JavaScript to Java, and further modified for efficiency and reusability purposes.

Congratulations Misty!

Congratulations to Misty Harris on the successful completion of her Capstone Project, "Health Risk Assessment Use in Primary Care: Measuring Providers' Knowledge, Perceptions and Intentions to Use"  in the Master's in Public Health Program at CWRU!

The abstract of her project is pasted below.

Abstract

Objectives: Recent guidelines introduced by the Affordable Care Act for the Medicare Annual Wellness Visit specify the use of a health risk assessment (HRA). Benefits of employer- or insurance-based HRAs are known but limited scholarship has addressed healthcare-based HRAs. The objective of this study was to measure primary care provider’s perceptions and acceptance of using HRAs in patient care.

Methods: Provider survey scales were authored from theory driven model constructs and distributed to primary care providers first in an academic, safety-net medical center and then through a local practice-based research network. 

Results: 113 primary care providers responded. Only 53.3% had ever even heard or read about a HRA and just 24.3% had asked a patient to use one, but over half were interested in using one with patients.

Conclusions: There is low knowledge and use of HRAs by this group of providers despite inclusion of the tool in the ACA and proposed benefits to patients and providers, none of which can be realized if providers do not know about or are unwilling or unable to use health risk assessments in primary care practice.

 

Congratulations Xiangcao!

Congratulations to Xiangcao Liu on the successful defense of his Master's Project, "HRA: Health Risk Assessment System" in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science!

Abstract

HRA Health Risk Assessment System

by

Xiangcao Liu

A health risk Assessment system is an important tool for helping people realize what lifestyle changes they should have and what benefits they can have by doing things the right way in order to live healthier and longer.  In this thesis, we discuss various components of a health risk assessment system, called the HRA system, which is being developed by a multi-institutional team of researchers from The MetroHealth System, Case Western Reserve University, and other institutions. 

The HRA system takes the questionnaire answers of the user, and produces multiple visualized reports with messages, pictures and bar charts over a range of calculated statistics about the participant’s health status, that highlight potential death risks to the user. The questions in the questionnaire include basic demographic information, epidemiologic data, and life-style information. Health providers can use this tool to communicate with patients on their health status, and individual users can use it to stay aware of their health situation, and, thus, take early measures to deal with risks in their lifestyles. 

This project has fully revamped the midlife HRA calculation library from a previous version, implemented a risk computation library for the older adult HRA (twenty minute version and comprehensive version), and developed a visualization library for HRA report rendering.