TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schlee, Winfried
A1  - Simoes, Jorge
A1  - Pryss, Rüdiger
T1  - Auricular acupressure combined with self-help intervention for treating chronic tinnitus: a longitudinal observational study
JF  - Journal of Clinical Medicine
N2  - 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.
KW  - tinnitus
KW  - acupressure
KW  - self-help
KW  - ecological momentary assessment
KW  - stress
Y1  - 2021
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-246209
SN  - 2077-0383
VL  - 10
IS  - 18
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kraft, Robin
A1  - Reichert, Manfred
A1  - Pryss, Rüdiger
T1  - Towards the interpretation of sound measurements from smartphones collected with mobile crowdsensing in the healthcare domain: an experiment with Android devices
JF  - Sensors
N2  - 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.
KW  - mHealth
KW  - crowdsensing
KW  - tinnitus
KW  - noise measurement
KW  - environmental sound
Y1  - 2021
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-252246
SN  - 1424-8220
VL  - 22
IS  - 1
ER  -