@article{SchleeNeffSimoesetal.2022, author = {Schlee, Winfried and Neff, Patrick and Simoes, Jorge and Langguth, Berthold and Schoisswohl, Stefan and Steinberger, Heidi and Norman, Marie and Spiliopoulou, Myra and Schobel, Johannes and Hannemann, Ronny and Pryss, R{\"u}diger}, title = {Smartphone-guided educational counseling and self-help for chronic tinnitus}, series = {Journal of Clinical Medicine}, volume = {11}, journal = {Journal of Clinical Medicine}, number = {7}, issn = {2077-0383}, doi = {10.3390/jcm11071825}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-267295}, year = {2022}, abstract = {Tinnitus is an auditory phantom perception in the ears or head in the absence of a corresponding external stimulus. There is currently no effective treatment available that reliably reduces tinnitus. Educational counseling is a treatment approach that aims to educate patients and inform them about possible coping strategies. For this feasibility study, we implemented educational material and self-help advice in a smartphone app. Participants used the educational smartphone app unsupervised during their daily routine over a period of four months. Comparing the tinnitus outcome measures before and after smartphone-guided treatment, we measured changes in tinnitus-related distress, but not in tinnitus loudness. Improvements on the Tinnitus Severity numeric rating scale reached an effect size of 0.408, while the improvements on the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI) were much smaller with an effect size of 0.168. An analysis of user behavior showed that frequent and intensive use of the app is a crucial factor for treatment success: participants that used the app more often and interacted with the app intensively reported a stronger improvement in the tinnitus. Between study allocation and final assessment, 26 of 52 participants dropped out of the study. Reasons for the dropouts and lessons for future studies are discussed in this paper.}, language = {en} } @article{AllgaierSchleeProbstetal.2022, author = {Allgaier, Johannes and Schlee, Winfried and Probst, Thomas and Pryss, R{\"u}diger}, title = {Prediction of tinnitus perception based on daily life mHealth data using country origin and season}, series = {Journal of Clinical Medicine}, volume = {11}, journal = {Journal of Clinical Medicine}, number = {15}, issn = {2077-0383}, doi = {10.3390/jcm11154270}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-281812}, year = {2022}, abstract = {Tinnitus is an auditory phantom perception without external sound stimuli. This chronic perception can severely affect quality of life. Because tinnitus symptoms are highly heterogeneous, multimodal data analyses are increasingly used to gain new insights. MHealth data sources, with their particular focus on country- and season-specific differences, can provide a promising avenue for new insights. Therefore, we examined data from the TrackYourTinnitus (TYT) mHealth platform to create symptom profiles of TYT users. We used gradient boosting engines to classify momentary tinnitus and regress tinnitus loudness, using country of origin and season as features. At the daily assessment level, tinnitus loudness can be regressed with a mean absolute error rate of 7.9\% points. In turn, momentary tinnitus can be classified with an F1 score of 93.79\%. Both results indicate differences in the tinnitus of TYT users with respect to season and country of origin. The significance of the features was evaluated using statistical and explainable machine learning methods. It was further shown that tinnitus varies with temperature in certain countries. The results presented show that season and country of origin appear to be valuable features when combined with longitudinal mHealth data at the level of daily assessment.}, language = {en} } @article{KraftReichertPryss2021, author = {Kraft, Robin and Reichert, Manfred and Pryss, R{\"u}diger}, title = {Towards the interpretation of sound measurements from smartphones collected with mobile crowdsensing in the healthcare domain: an experiment with Android devices}, series = {Sensors}, volume = {22}, journal = {Sensors}, number = {1}, issn = {1424-8220}, doi = {10.3390/s22010170}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-252246}, year = {2021}, abstract = {The ubiquity of mobile devices fosters the combined use of ecological momentary assessments (EMA) and mobile crowdsensing (MCS) in the field of healthcare. This combination not only allows researchers to collect ecologically valid data, but also to use smartphone sensors to capture the context in which these data are collected. The TrackYourTinnitus (TYT) platform uses EMA to track users' individual subjective tinnitus perception and MCS to capture an objective environmental sound level while the EMA questionnaire is filled in. However, the sound level data cannot be used directly among the different smartphones used by TYT users, since uncalibrated raw values are stored. This work describes an approach towards making these values comparable. In the described setting, the evaluation of sensor measurements from different smartphone users becomes increasingly prevalent. Therefore, the shown approach can be also considered as a more general solution as it not only shows how it helped to interpret TYT sound level data, but may also stimulate other researchers, especially those who need to interpret sensor data in a similar setting. Altogether, the approach will show that measuring sound levels with mobile devices is possible in healthcare scenarios, but there are many challenges to ensuring that the measured values are interpretable.}, language = {en} } @article{SchleeSimoesPryss2021, author = {Schlee, Winfried and Simoes, Jorge and Pryss, R{\"u}diger}, title = {Auricular acupressure combined with self-help intervention for treating chronic tinnitus: a longitudinal observational study}, series = {Journal of Clinical Medicine}, volume = {10}, journal = {Journal of Clinical Medicine}, number = {18}, issn = {2077-0383}, doi = {10.3390/jcm10184201}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-246209}, year = {2021}, abstract = {Tinnitus is a phantom sound perception in the ears or head and can arise from many different medical disorders. Currently, there is no standard treatment for tinnitus that reliably reduces tinnitus. Individual patients reported that acupressure at various points around the ear can help to reduce tinnitus, which was investigated here. With this longitudinal observational study, we report a systematic evaluation of auricular acupressure on 39 tinnitus sufferers, combined with a self-help smartphone app. The participants were asked to report on tinnitus, stress, mood, neck, and jaw muscle tensions twice a day using an ecological momentary assessment study design for six weeks. On average, 123.6 questionnaires per person were provided and used for statistical analysis. The treatment responses of the participants were heterogeneous. On average, we observed significant negative trends for tinnitus loudness (Cohen's d effect size: -0.861), tinnitus distress (d = -0.478), stress (d = -0.675), and tensions in the neck muscles (d = -0.356). Comparison with a matched control group revealed significant improvements for tinnitus loudness (p = 0.027) and self-reported stress level (p = 0.003). The positive results of the observational study motivate further research including a randomized clinical trial and long-term assessment of the clinical improvement.}, language = {en} } @article{KraftBirkReichertetal.2020, author = {Kraft, Robin and Birk, Ferdinand and Reichert, Manfred and Deshpande, Aniruddha and Schlee, Winfried and Langguth, Berthold and Baumeister, Harald and Probst, Thomas and Spiliopoulou, Myra and Pryss, R{\"u}diger}, title = {Efficient processing of geospatial mHealth data using a scalable crowdsensing platform}, series = {Sensors}, volume = {20}, journal = {Sensors}, number = {12}, issn = {1424-8220}, doi = {10.3390/s20123456}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-207826}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Smart sensors and smartphones are becoming increasingly prevalent. Both can be used to gather environmental data (e.g., noise). Importantly, these devices can be connected to each other as well as to the Internet to collect large amounts of sensor data, which leads to many new opportunities. In particular, mobile crowdsensing techniques can be used to capture phenomena of common interest. Especially valuable insights can be gained if the collected data are additionally related to the time and place of the measurements. However, many technical solutions still use monolithic backends that are not capable of processing crowdsensing data in a flexible, efficient, and scalable manner. In this work, an architectural design was conceived with the goal to manage geospatial data in challenging crowdsensing healthcare scenarios. It will be shown how the proposed approach can be used to provide users with an interactive map of environmental noise, allowing tinnitus patients and other health-conscious people to avoid locations with harmful sound levels. Technically, the shown approach combines cloud-native applications with Big Data and stream processing concepts. In general, the presented architectural design shall serve as a foundation to implement practical and scalable crowdsensing platforms for various healthcare scenarios beyond the addressed use case.}, language = {en} } @article{PryssSchleeHoppenstedtetal.2020, author = {Pryss, R{\"u}diger and Schlee, Winfried and Hoppenstedt, Burkhard and Reichert, Manfred and Spiliopoulou, Myra and Langguth, Berthold and Breitmayer, Marius and Probst, Thomas}, title = {Applying Machine Learning to Daily-Life Data From the TrackYourTinnitus Mobile Health Crowdsensing Platform to Predict the Mobile Operating System Used With High Accuracy: Longitudinal Observational Study}, series = {Journal of Medical Internet Research}, volume = {22}, journal = {Journal of Medical Internet Research}, number = {6}, doi = {10.2196/15547}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-229517}, year = {2020}, abstract = {Background: Tinnitus is often described as the phantom perception of a sound and is experienced by 5.1\% to 42.7\% of the population worldwide, at least once during their lifetime. The symptoms often reduce the patient's quality of life. The TrackYourTinnitus (TYT) mobile health (mHealth) crowdsensing platform was developed for two operating systems (OS)-Android and iOS-to help patients demystify the daily moment-to-moment variations of their tinnitus symptoms. In all platforms developed for more than one OS, it is important to investigate whether the crowdsensed data predicts the OS that was used in order to understand the degree to which the OS is a confounder that is necessary to consider.}, language = {en} }