This paper presents the StepKinnection game, a Kinect-driven stepping game for the elderly that delivers stepping exercises to train specific cognitive and physical abilities associated with falls. This system combines a set of suitable age-related features, meaningful exercise routines and an embedded clinical test for fall risk assessment. The combination of these three aspects makes the game...

PURPOSE We examined whether written emotional disclosure reduces stress and improves health outcomes for family caregivers of physically frail and cognitively impaired older adults, as it has been shown to do for certain student and clinical populations. DESIGN AND METHODS Primary caregivers of older adults attending a day program were randomly assigned to expressive-writing (n = 14), time-ma...

The notion of "reverse innovation"--that some insights from low-income countries might offer transferable lessons for wealthier contexts--is increasingly common in the global health and business strategy literature. Yet the perspectives of researchers and policymakers in settings where these innovations are developed have been largely absent from the discussion to date. In this Commentary, we p...

This paper makes two contributions to the literature on the effects of wealth on health. First, it deals with reverse causality and omitted variable bias by exploiting exogenous variation in inherited wealth generated by the repeal of the Swedish inheritance tax. Second, it analyzes responses in health outcomes through the use of administrative registers. The results show that increased wealth ...

With the dramatic pace of modernization of the world's population, human adaptation as a theoretical construct and paradigm will likely become a focal scientific issue involving scientists from many disciplinary areas during the 21st Century. Macro and micro environments are in rapid flux and human populations are exposed to rapid change. The concept of adaptation, at least in the field of biol...

OBJECTIVES Participants with complete accelerometer data often represent a low proportion of the total sample and, in some cases, may be distinguishable from participants with incomplete data. Because traditional reliability methods characterize the consistency of complete data, little is known about reliability properties for an entire sample. This study employed Generalizability theory to rep...

OBJECTIVE Structural and social neighbourhood constructs have been developed for studying a neighbourhood's influence on a variety of health outcomes; community surveys are being increasingly used for capturing such information. This paper has proposed a six-fold approach which integrates existing methodologies (i.e. multilevel factor analysis, ecometrics, multilevel spatial multiple membership...

Both the medical care and public health systems have invested considerable resources to define, measure, and improve quality and health outcomes. A movement toward accountability has generated performance indicators from the medical arena and "leading health indicators" from the public health arena. The focus on specific conditions by the medical care system has been at odds with public health'...

BACKGROUND Greater time spent screen-viewing (SV) has been linked to adverse health outcomes. The aim of this study was to examine whether parental SV time is associated with child SV time on week and weekend days. METHODS Cross-sectional survey of 1078 children aged 5-6 and at least 1 parent. Child and parent SV was reported for weekday and weekend days. Logistic regression examined whether ...

This review examines the performance of the UK health care system. After presenting data on the level and distribution of resources, three topics are examined. The first is the lessons from international comparisons of evidence on expenditure, equity and health care outcomes. The second is the lessons from the recent internal market reforms. The third is the lessons from an analysis of the role...